Open Stack

Hi Jay.

It's already getting late here and I still have to do my farm chores but I want to acknowledge your request. I think you've developed quite a wrong impression of things and clearly some of that is on us because in the early stages of forming the LCOO working group, we were all still trying to find our feet and in an effort to just get started, we wrote some things that in hind sight we would probably change today. Our group has been maturing and evolving as we have been discussing our shared purpose and also as a result of our collaboration with other working groups. The UC, EWG and PWG are all represented in LCOO and vice versa. Much of what you mention from the Confluence site, which we've only been using for about a month, is I think also being taken out of context. You called it "closed" but just as you were able to quickly and easily create an account, get access, and browse around, so can anyone else. In fact you also had the complete ability to create your own pages, read and comment on the pages, edit or even delete the pages, put things on the calendar, whatever. The pages work like etherpads allowing simultaneous editing but with much more powerful tools and the convenience of a wiki format. And hey, it was free. The site is completely open except for one small section and that is explained if you stumbled across it. Other working groups routinely put things in secured Google docs and such. I don't think we're out of line but just this morning we discussed ways to be more open. We were not publishing all our meetings in the User Committee email list which was an oversight that we're correcting. I'd encourage you to just reach out to us with any questions or concerns before taking what certainly feels like a confrontational posture in such a broadly public forum. We're all community members and we're exploring how best to make a significant, positive contribution. That is what everyone wants to do.

I'm not a co-chair of LCOO, but I am a co-chair of a sub-team that we recently formed to begin laying the groundwork for what we hope will eventually become some significant contributions from a working group perspective. I don't speak for the group, I'm just telling you my opinion. First of all I cannot understand why the community would not want to welcome people who want to contribute? I don't think that we deserve to be called about and have our right to exist challenged. You all work alongside the companies that have come together under LCOO every day. We're all community members. There is nothing nefarious going on, no hidden agenda, no secret bid for power or any other such thing. There is no need for fear and anyone is welcome to attend meetings, view agendas and minutes, comment on and add to them. IMO, our identity could be best characterized as large operators whose companies are also committed to being significant contributors to the development effort. That brings some unique character to LCOO. We wanted to avoid creating a forum where everyone comes with their complaints, demands and wish lists. We wanted to create a group in which everyone has real skin in the game. In which everyone is a contributor. Our identity is also as USERS of openstack. 

We've been working closely with the PTG in particular to explore how we can assist them in sourcing user driven requirements with end to end commitment through the entire process lifecycle (https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/ProductTeam/User_Stories#User_Story_Workflow).  There are many "Stories" that are languishing for lack of committed sponsorship. LCOO is in a unique position to not only be able to take on and help drive some of these needs that the community has surfaced, from a requirements perspective, but the 9 member companies that we have thus far also have considerable collective dev contributors who could potentially assists in the delivery. As we understand it we are attempting to respond to an important need that was called out in Barcelona.  As we've been finding our feet we've been exploring how we can be of most benefit to the community and we've been laying the practical groundwork for that. You're right, until now our wg has not contributed much from a working group perspective. But at the same time the member companies have collectively had hundreds of developers actively contributing. You yourself have been working alongside them. 

Another aspect of what we've been doing is providing a forum in which participants can discuss the challenges they're experiencing from a USER perspective. Share information, solutions, help one another. For example we had some meetings where AT&T presented about Gluon which you seem to have keyed in on. But the Gluon project is not being managed from within LCOO meetings. Gluon is a project that AT&T initiated, but as you saw, it's being managed separately. LCOO does not have an OPNFV jira instance. We do have an LCOO Jira instance, but we're still getting it ready to begin using it. You could have jumped right into it when you were in our Confluence site. They're integrated. We also dedicated many sessions to sharing what each other is working on in the community. But none of that work has been planned or driven from within LCOO thus far and that is not our focus. We want to be aware of one another's efforts, offer feedback and support, but LCOO is not the BORG. That said though, we are hoping to take on a small number of efforts for the Community of the nature I described earlier under the PWG Process linked above. I'm optimistic that we may be able to do that in time to (if all goes smoothly) see actual development underway in Queens. That's something that we'll need JIRA for, to help with the planning and tracking across the broad openstack portfolio. That's the same way that many others in the community use JIRA, including OSIC who we recently had meetings with to explore how they were using it.

Personally I resent having our right to form a working group like this challenged at all. But I hope I've been able to lay some of your concerns to rest. The bottom line is that we're all in this together. Politics be damned, let's pull together and do all that we can to make OpenStack as great as it can be and make the world a better place along the way. Here in the USA where I live, I find myself rather disgusted with politics right now. Let's move forward.

-Andy

-----Original Message-----
From: Jay Pipes [mailto:jaypipes at gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, February 02, 2017 7:23 PM
To: Edgar Magana <edgar.magana at workday.com>; openstack-operators at lists.openstack.org; user-committee at lists.openstack.org
Cc: MCCABE, JAMEY A <jm6819 at att.com>; UKASICK, ANDREW <au3678 at att.com>
Subject: Re: [Openstack-operators] [openstack-dev] Large Contributing OpenStack Operators working group?

On 02/02/2017 05:02 PM, Edgar Magana wrote:
> Jay,
>
> I am including the WG chairs to make sure they answers your questions and addresses your concerns.
> In Barcelona the UC asked exactly the same questions and recommended to the co-chairs of the LCOO WG to work with the existing WG to identify overlapping activities and either to work together or go ahead with the WG if there were not overlapping on goals and deliverables.

Was there any follow-on from that request from the UC?

> I will let the co-chairs to follow up yours questions. BTW. I do not think this topic should be posted in the openstack-dev mailing list. So, I will BCC it.

Sure, no problem.

> Andrew and Jamey,
>
> Please, address these questions. Let’s work all together to make sure that we have all groups aligned and coordinated.

Thanks, Edgar, appreciated. Andrew and Jamey, please do let me know if you would like me to rephrase or elaborate on any questions. Happy to do so. I genuinely want to see alignment with other groups in this effort.

Best,
-jay

> Thanks,
>
> Edgar
>
> On 2/2/17, 12:14 PM, "Jay Pipes" <jaypipes at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>     Hi,
>
>     I was told about this group today. I have a few questions. Hopefully
>     someone from this team can illuminate me with some answers.
>
>     1) What is the purpose of this group? The wiki states that the team
>     "aims to define the use cases and identify and prioritise the
>     requirements which are needed to deploy, manage, and run services on top
>     of OpenStack. This work includes identifying functional gaps, creating
>     blueprints, submitting and reviewing patches to the relevant OpenStack
>     projects, contributing to working those items, tracking their completion."
>
>     What is the difference between the LCOO and the following existing
>     working groups?
>
>       * Large Deployment Team
>       * Massively Distributed Team
>       * Product Working Group
>       * Telco/NFV Working Group
>
>     2) According to the wiki page, only companies that are "Multi-Cloud
>     Operator[s] and/or Network Service Provider[s]" are welcome in this
>     team. Why is the team called "Large Contributing OpenStack Operators" if
>     it's only for Telcos? Further, if this is truly only for Telcos, why
>     isn't the Telco/NFV working group appropriate?
>
>     3) Under the "Guiding principles" section of the above wiki, the top
>     principle is "Align with the OpenStack Foundation". If this is the case,
>     why did the group move its content to the closed Atlassian Confuence
>     platform? Why does the group have a set of separate Slack channels
>     instead of using the OpenStack mailing lists and IRC channels? Why is
>     the OPNFV Jira used for tracking work items for the LCOO agenda?
>
>     See https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__wiki.openstack.org_wiki_Gluon_Tasks-2DOcata&d=DwICAg&c=DS6PUFBBr_KiLo7Sjt3ljp5jaW5k2i9ijVXllEdOozc&r=G0XRJfDQsuBvqa_wpWyDAUlSpeMV4W1qfWqBfctlWwQ&m=haOSpIhsa6KyDvuhRFigFVTLrTJxJ1Zv3kfm0JwTTtY&s=kntt00JEwpizTxQus4U9FhnwF_7WicJ7oRncGmkYPGc&e=  for examples.
>
>     4) I see a lot of agenda items around projects like Gluon, Craton,
>     Watcher, and Blazar. I don't see any concrete ideas about talking with
>     the developers of the key infrastructure services that OpenStack is
>     built around. How does the LCOO plan on reaching out to the developers
>     of the long-standing OpenStack projects like Nova, Neutron, Cinder, and
>     Keystone to drive their shared agenda?
>
>     Thanks for reading and (hopefully) answering.
>
>     -jay
>
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