Open Stack

On 2017-02-03 21:50:25 +0000 (+0000), MCCABE, JAMEY A wrote:
[...]
> The LCOO is a group of Multi-cloud Operators who are also
> development contributors (read we have staff who are project
> members and desire to jointly increase our participation in the
> project teams).
[...]

It's unclear to me what definition of "operators" is being used
there. As far as I'm aware our other working groups are made up of
individuals, not organizations, so are the individual members of
this group systems administrators who also write features and fixes
for the upstream OpenStack software as developers? Or are you saying
that you're sysadmins who have the ear of some particular upstream
developers? Or is it that you're mostly in nontechnical roles but
have close relationships with some sysadmins and upstream
developers?

I'm interpreting it as the last one, but just want to be clear as to
the balance you're striking between direct involvement (implementing
what you need yourself) and indirection (compelling others, perhaps
in your employ, to implement what you need). The difference may seem
subtle, but it can have a significant impact on the amount of
influence you'll manifest or the degree to which your efforts might
be met with indifference and perhaps even resistance. Many coming
from large corporate environments are used to "top-down"
organization, while free software is very much a "bottom-up"
environment where those doing the work to implement fixes and new
features hold most of the community influence and are the ones who
ultimately need convincing.

> We don’t' have prescriptive rules for who will join LCOO and
> probably can't and really not looking to group our members that
> tightly. Anyone who thinks they fit the pattern and looking to
> join to help drive it along is welcome.
[...]

That's reassuring. https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/LCOO#How_to_Join
is a bit hard to follow as, again, it seems to conflate people with
organizations. It implies that the individuals who make up the
working group are systems administrators and contributors to our
software, but then it says "with at least 4 FTEs" so are these FTEs
the actual working group members? Or someone "representing" those
engineers participates in working group meetings on their behalf?
In its current state, the document is also far more restrictive
about who is allowed to join than your comment above would seem to
indicate. Maybe it could use a bit of rewording.

Under the Governance section, it even uses the phrase "member
companies" which is a concept I find strange and confusing in such
context. Companies are made up of individual people, and it's these
people who should be involved and accountable for their own opinions
and actions within the scope of a working group.

> we've identified the Atlassian toolset (Confluence and
> Jira) as promising tools to help us accomplish that upfront
> process. It's pretty exciting and once we are running well we'll
> be interested to share if other WG are interested. We are
> following patterns we see at OPNFV and in OSIC
[...]

I'll refrain from restating the usual "free software needs free
tools" ideology here, but if you want to provide feedback to the
OpenStack community as to what the shortcomings were with the
available free tools we use it would be much appreciated. I also
find it interesting that you looked to OPNFV and OSIC instead of
OpenStack for patterns to follow; so again if you have any details
as to what was lacking in our community workflows and governance,
that might help us understand where to focus on improving so we can
better serve your needs in the future.
-- 
Jeremy Stanley
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