[Openstack-sigs] [tc]Global Reachout Proposal

Adam Spiers aspiers at suse.com
Wed Sep 19 11:57:25 UTC 2018


[Meta-topic: I see that this thread started as a cross-post to
openstack-{dev,operators,sigs}, but this subthread is only on -sigs,
which presumably fractures the thread.  Is there an accepted best
practice addressing this problem?]

Jaesuk Ahn <bluejay.ahn at gmail.com> wrote: 
>On Wed, Sep 19, 2018 at 5:30 AM Zane Bitter <zbitter at redhat.com> wrote: 
>>...
>>
>>Perhaps there are others too? 
>>
>>Obvious questions to ask from there would be: 
>>
>>- Whether this is the most important issue facing contributors from the 
>>APAC region 
>>
>>- To what extent the proposed solution is expected to help 
>
>I do agree with Zane on the above point. 
>
>As one of OpenStack participants from Asia region, I will put my personal 
>opinion.
>IRC and ML has been an unified and standard way of communication in 
>OpenStack Community, and that has been a good way to encourage "open 
>communication" on a unified method wherever you are from, or whatever 
>background you have. If the whole community start recognize some other 
>tools (say WeChat) as recommended alternative communication method because 
>there are many people there, ironically, it might be a way to break 
>"diversity" and "openness" we want to embrace. 

Agreed.

>Using whatever social media (or tools) in a specific region due to any 
>reason is not a problem. Anyone is free to use anything. Only thing we need 
>to make sure is, if you want to communicate officially with the whole 
>community, there is a very well defined and unified way to do it. This is 
>currently IRC and ML. Some of Korean dev has difficulties to use IRC. 

Any chance you could clarify what kind of difficulties they are
encountering?  As several TC members and others within this thread
have already pointed out, that would help the community decide whether
those difficulties can be addressed whilst keeping IRC, or whether
it's worth considering replacing IRC with something else.

>However, there is not a perfect tool out there in this world, and we accept 
>all the reason why the community selected IRC as official tool 
>
>But, that being said, There are some things I am facing with IRC from here 
>in Korea
>
>As a person from Asia, I do have some of pain points. Because of time 
>differences, often, I have to do achieve searching since most of 
>conversations happened while I am sleeping. IRC is not a good tool to 
>perform "search backlog". Although there is message archive you can dig, it 
>is still hard. This is a problem. I do love to see any technical solution 
>for me to efficiently and easily go through irc backlog, like most of 
>modern chat tools. 

Would this particular pain point be solved by providing a friendly web 
search interface to the IRC log archives?  BTW it is already possible to 
search them via google, by including 

    site:eavesdrop.openstack.org

in the search, but of course this is not very user-friendly. 

>Secondly, IRC is not a popular one even in dev community here in Korea. In 
>addition, in order to properly use irc, you need to do extra work, 
>something like setting up bouncing server. I had to do google search to 
>figure out how to use it. 

I agree - this is probably the biggest issue with IRC, not just in 
Korea or even in Asia, but globally.  People are much more aware of 
this pain now because modern alternatives such as Slack, HipChat, 
Rocket.chat, Matrix etc. all solve that problem without requiring any 
extra effort from the user. 

>In that sense, It would be great to have 
>OpenStack community provided, simplified and well-written, written in 
>multiple language, IRC guide docs. 

Yes, if we stick with IRC then this certainly makes sense. 

>Alternatively, if OpenStack community 
>can provide a good web-based irc client tool, that would be fantastic. 

It already exists: Matrix's web client Riot has a built-in bridge with 
Freenode: 

    https://opensource.com/article/17/5/introducing-riot-IRC

Thinking further ahead, I have previously floated the idea of the 
community switching to Matrix altogether: 

    http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-sigs/2018-March/000332.html

I have to be honest: right now, whilst Matrix's usability is actually 
pretty good, it still needs a bit of work before it gets as slick as 
something like Slack.  In particular, performance of the Freenode bridge 
is not always great.  But like IRC, Matrix is all open source with a 
decentralized architecture, so I'm fairly confident that with a bit of 
investment from the OpenStack community (whether that's financial or 
developer resources), we could get it good enough for what we want. 
And I think that would help push for the best outcome for the wider 
FLOSS community outside OpenStack and the rest of the world, too. 

>As I described the above, we can certainly have a healthy discussion on 
>what different and real problems we are facing from Asia. 
>However, I don't think this TC resolution is good way to do that. 

Thanks a lot for sharing your perspective!  IMHO it's very helpful. 



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