Open Stack

Hi,

On 11/18/2013 11:43 PM, Stefano Maffulli wrote:
> I have the impression that talking to PTLs alone may not be sufficient
> and we may want to get in touch with product managers from companies
> shipping products based on OpenStack, asking their feedback and
> commitment. PTLs have their opinions about priorities of features and
> bug fixes, users have opinions about them  too and product managers are
> probably the ones more likely capable of dedicating resources to them
> anyway (PTLs in the end are generals with no army).
> 
> What do you think?

Funny you should mention this - I had a number of conversations in Hong
Kong where I suggested something like a "vendors working group" where
product managers from various vendors could interact.

One of the issues that a project like OpenStack has is that developers
can be somewhat insulated from their users - between the developer and
the user, there might be an engineering manager, a product manager and
(in the case of a product) support and/or sales. And inside an
organisation using OpenStack, the people actually deploying applications
on OpenStack will probably give their feedback to the operations team,
who will feed that up their management chain, where the feedback will
finally come back into the supporting vendor through support or product
management.

So potentially an issue that an application developer is having with
OpenStack at the user level could go through 4 or 5 layers of proxies
before it gets back to the developers. There's a huge potential for
corruption to get in the way - as people along the chain don't forward
on the feedback they have received, but their suggestions for ways to
fix the perceived issue.

One of the great things about open source is the direct relationship
between users and developers, but in a project like OpenStack with lots
of product vendors, it would be wise, I think, to have regular
conversations between product managers to ensure that we agree on the
problems we are seeing from customers who might not otherwise have a
relationship with the project.

Rather than have 2 vendors try to solve the same core problem in 2
different incompatible ways (and end up in a pissing contest about whose
solution should get upstream), some earlier non-binding
relationship-building conversations might help defuse these situations
earlier.

The idea would not be to take authority away from PTLs or the TC, but to
ensure that the voice of the customer is heard in those discussions.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary - Community Action and Impact
Open Source and Standards, Red Hat - http://community.redhat.com
Ph: +33 9 50 71 55 62 / Cell: +33 6 77 01 92 13