On 03/09/2017 12:10 PM, Jonathan Bryce wrote:
Hi Ben,
On Mar 9, 2017, at 10:23 AM, Ben Swartzlander <b...@swartzlander.org> wrote:
I might be the only one who has negative feelings about the PTG/Forum split,
but I suspect the foundation is suppressing negative feedback from myself and
other developers so I'll express my feelings here. If there's anyone else who
feels like me please reply, otherwise I'll assume I'm just an outlier.
“Suppressing negative feedback” is a pretty strong accusation (and I’m honestly
not sure how you even imagine we are doing that). I searched through the last 2
years of mailing list threads and couldn’t find negative feedback from you
around the PTG. Same for googling around the internet in general. I might have
missed a place where you had provided this feedback, so feel free to pass it
along again. Also, if there’s some proof behind the accusation, I would love to
see it so I can address it with whoever might be doing the suppressing. It’s
certainly not something I would support anyone in the foundation doing. You can
send it to me directly off-list if you feel more comfortable providing it that
way.
I filled out the official PTG feedback survey in Atlanta and I
completely panned the event in the survey. I don't know if my name was
attached to that, but it doesn't matter. I wasn't able to attend the
in-person feedback session because again, it was scheduled on top of
time we were using to get work on as a Manila team.
All I know is that the announcement after the PTG was that the feedback
on the event was all pretty good. I conclude from that that either there
are very few people who feel like me, or that there are more and their
feedback was ignored. This ML thread is an attempt to give voice to us
whether it's just a handful or actually a large number.
I'm not going to write a blog entry that says "OpenStack PTG sucked".
That would be asinine. I think this developers list is small enough that
we can have a serious and productive discussion about whether the
current PTG/Forum event split has merits _for the developer community_.
Putting that aside, I appreciate your providing your input. The most consistent
piece of feedback we received was around scheduling and visibility for
sessions, so I think that is definitely an area for improvement at the next
PTG. I heard mixed feedback on whether the ability to participate in multiple
projects was better or worse than under the previous model, but understanding
common conflicts ahead of time might give us a chance to schedule in a way that
makes the multi-project work more possible. Did you participate in both Cinder
and Manila mid-cycles in addition to the Design Summit sessions previously?
Trying to understand which types of specific interactions you’re now less able
to participate in.
Yes in the past I was able to attend all of the Manila and most of the
Cinder sessions at the Design summit, and I was able to attend the
Cinder midcycles in person and (since I'm the PTL) I was able to
schedule the Manila midcycles to not conflict.
I’m also interested in finding ways to support remote participation, but it’s a
hard problem that has failed more often than it’s worked when we’ve tried it.
I’m still open to continuing to attempt new methods—we actually brainstormed
some ideas in Atlanta and if you have any suggestions, let’s experiment the
next time around.
My feeling on remote participation is that it's something the project
teams can manage themselves. If we're going to have a "virtual midcycle"
(which many projects do) then the team can set it up and nothing is
required from the foundation to facilitate it. Trying to mix the
in-person interactions of a summit/forum/ptg with remote attendees
usually just leads to a poor experience for the remote participants.
When we have in-person events we do our best to include remote people
who can't attend but IMO that's still inferior to planning a fully
virtual event that puts everyone on equal footing.
The PTG was actually an idea that was initiated by development teams, and
something that we tried to organize to make it as productive as possible for
the teams. The goal of the PTGs is to provide focused time to that help us make
better software, and there’s really no other benefit that the Foundation gets
from them. We did have some teams, like Kuryr, who did not participate in
person at the PTG. I talked to Antoni before and offered to assist with
whatever we could when they did their VTG, and we will continue to support
teams whether they participate in future PTGs or not.
I've been part of OpenStack a long time and my perception of history is
a bit different. I recall a frustration from developers who attended
design summits that it was hard to attend both the design summit and the
conference because they were scheduled on top of eachother. What people
wanted was a way to attend both events -- either by making the
conference longer or by splitting it into 2 mini conferences. Somewhere
along the line scope creep happened and instead of simply splitting 1
event into 2, new stuff (the Forum) got added. My objection is
specifically to this scope creep and the increased expectations on
developers.
Thanks for keeping an open mind on the Forum. If you have opinions around what
will make it more or less successful, please get involved in the planning for
it. It’s being planned and scheduled in the open with input from the dev and
user communities. I’ll be looking out for your feedback after Boston. Promise I
won’t do anything to suppress it, positive or negative. = )
Thanks for listening. Sorry if my suspicion sounded like an accusation.
I honestly don't know if I'm alone or in good company with my feelings
about PTG. My stance remains that the "old way" was better with 2
foundation-organized events per year and projects on their own to manage
additional meetings.
-Ben Swartzlander
Jonathan
The new structure is asking developers to travel 4 times a year (minimum) and
makes it impossible to participate in 2 or more vertical projects.
I know that most of the people working on Manila have pretty limited travel
budgets, and meeting 4 times a year basically guarantees that a good number of
people will be remote at any given meeting. From my perspective if I'm going to
be meeting with people on the phone I'd rather be on the phone myself and have
everyone on equal footing.
I also normally try to participate in Cinder as well as Manila and the new PTG
structures makes that impossible. I decided to try to be positive and to wait
until after the PTG to make up my mind but having attended in Atlanta it was
exactly as bad as I expected in terms of my ability to participate in Cinder.
I will be in Boston to try to develop a firsthand opinion of the new Forum
format but as of now I'm pretty unhappy with the proposal. For Manila I'm
proposing that the community either meets at PTG and skips conferences or
meetings at conferences and skips PTGs going forward. I'm not going to ask
everyone to travel 4 times a year.
-Ben Swartzlander
Manila PTL
On 03/07/2017 07:35 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
Hi everyone,
I recently got more information about the space dedicated to the "Forum"
at the OpenStack Summit in Boston. We'll have three different types of
spaces available.
1/ "Forum" proper
There will be 3 medium-sized fishbowl rooms for cross-community
discussions. Topics for the discussions in that space will be selected
and scheduled by a committee formed of TC and UC members, facilitated by
Foundation staff members. In case you missed it, the brainstorming for
topics started last week, announced by Emilien in that email:
http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2017-March/113115.html
2/ "On-boarding" rooms
We'll have two rooms set up in classroom style, dedicated to project
teams and workgroups who want to on-board new team members. Those can
for example be booked by project teams to run an introduction to their
codebase to prospective new contributors, in the hope that they will
join their team in the future. Those are not meant to do traditional
user-facing "project intro" talks -- there is space in the conference
for that. They are meant to provide the next logical step in
contributing after Upstream University and being involved on the
sidelines. It covers the missing link for prospective contributors
between attending Summit and coming to the PTG. Kendall Nelson and Mike
Perez will soon announce the details for this, including how projects
can sign up.
3/ Free hacking/meetup space
We'll have four or five rooms populated with roundtables for ad-hoc
discussions and hacking. We don't have specific plans for these -- we
could set up something like the PTG ethercalc for teams to book the
space, or keep it open. Maybe half/half.
More details on all this as they come up.
Hoping to see you there !
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