Stefano, I was informed (in a private message on IRC) that where I said "Twenty First amendment" I should have said "Eighteenth Amendment". The former repealed the latter.
My apologies to all who were trying to figure out what I may have meant. -amrith P.S. Why I got that in a private message I know not. | -----Original Message----- | From: Amrith Kumar [mailto:amr...@tesora.com] | Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2015 12:20 PM | To: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) | Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [all][tc] Lets keep our community open, lets | fight for it | | Stefano, | | You write: | | | This is seriously disturbing. | | | | If you're one of those core reviewers hanging out on a private | | channel, please contact me privately: I'd love to hear from you why we | | failed as a community at convincing you that an open channel is the | place to be. | | | | No public shaming, please: education first. | | I was going to contact you privately but figured that would be ironic | given the conversation we're having. So here is my reply to you in the | open, for all to see and respond. | | Let me begin by saying that I agree with a lot of what Flavio wrote. | | Where he says that decisions and discussions must always be made in the | open, he is dead-on. | | Where he says that decisions in private are bad, he is dead-on. | | I beg to differ however on the subject of discussions in private | (emphasis: discussions, not decisions). Now that sounds bad but let's | leave private IRC channels aside. | | If you and I had a phone call, that's not a bad thing. What is bad if we | colluded in some way, and made a decision that we then foisted on the | community as a "done deal". | | IRC is a great thing and so is the mailing list. And a lot of | conversations are well suited for those mediums. And I read them regularly | and I find them useful. However, I will admit that there are times when I | just pick up the phone and call a colleague or call some other ATC in | OpenStack. | | As Flavio says in his email: | | | > ## Keep discussions open | | > | | > I don't believe there's anything wrong about kicking off some | | > discussions in private channels about specs/bugs. I don't believe | | > there's anything wrong in having calls to speed up some discussions. | | > HOWEVER, I believe it's *completely* wrong to consider those private | | > discussions sufficient. | | Further, there are in fact times when members of a core team can have | meaningful discussions about things. Security related bugs are one, on | occasion things like people's conduct (when it is marginal) and I can make | a list of a couple of more things easily, but I think you see the point. | | Given time-zones, long distance costs, and the like, IRC is a good option | as is a private skype call or skype IM. Not everything is suitable for | IRC/mailing list and a public forum. And in some cases since a public IRC | channel with three parallel conversations going can be noisy, a less | cluttered private conversation is invaluable. | | Mostly, I'm very happy to see Flavio's email which ends with this: | | > All the above being said, I'd like to thank everyone who fights for | > the openness of our community and encourage everyone to make that a | > must have thing in each sub-community. You don't need to be core- | reviewer or PTL to do so. Speak up and help keeping the community as open | as possible. | | Open decision making and discussion are absolutely the lifeblood of an | open source community. And I agree, as an ATC I will fight for the open | discussion and decision making. In equal measure, I recognize that I'm | human and there are times when a quiet "sidebar" with someone, either on | the telephone, or over a glass of suitable beverage can go further and | quicker than any extent of public conversation with the exact same | participants. | | You write: | | | This is seriously disturbing. | | Yes, what would be seriously disturbing would be if there were decisions | being made without the open/public scrutiny. | | There seems to be a leap-of-faith that a private IRC channel implies | covert decisions and therefore they should be shutdown. OK, great, the | Twenty-First Amendment took the same point of view, see how well that | worked out. | | I assure you that later today, tomorrow, and the next day, I will have | private conversations with other ATC's. Some will be on the telephone, and | some will be on public IRC channels with some totally unique name that | you'd never know to guess. But, I will try my best to, and I welcome the | feedback when people feel that I deviate from the norm of ensuring public, | open discussion and decision making where all are invited to participate. | | Personally, I think the focus on password protected IRC channels is a | distraction from the real issue that we need to ensure that the rapidly | growing community is one where public discussion and decision making are | still "the norm". Let's be adult about it and realize that people will | have private conversations. What we need to focus on is ensuring that the | community rejects "private decision making". | | There, I said it, and I said it in the open. | | -amrith | | -- | | Amrith Kumar, CTO Tesora (www.tesora.com) | | Twitter: @amrithkumar | IRC: amrith @freenode | I work on OpenStack Trove (#openstack-trove) | | | | | -----Original Message----- | | From: Stefano Maffulli [mailto:stef...@openstack.org] | | Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2015 9:15 AM | | To: openstack-dev@lists.openstack.org | | Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [all][tc] Lets keep our community open, | | lets fight for it | | | | On Wed, 2015-02-11 at 10:55 +0100, Flavio Percoco wrote: | | > This email is dedicated to the openness of our community/project. | | | | It's good to have a reminder every now and then. Thank you Flavio for | | caring enough to notice bad patterns and for raising a flag. | | | | > ## Keep discussions open | | > | | > I don't believe there's anything wrong about kicking off some | | > discussions in private channels about specs/bugs. I don't believe | | > there's anything wrong in having calls to speed up some discussions. | | > HOWEVER, I believe it's *completely* wrong to consider those private | | > discussions sufficient. | | [...] | | | | Well said. Conversations can happen anywhere and any time, but they | | should stay in open and accessible channels. Consensus needs to be | | built and decisions need to be shared, agreed upon by the community at | | large (and mailing lists are the most accessible media we have). | | | | That said, it's is very hard to generalize and I'd rather deal/solve | | specific examples. Sometimes, I'm sure there are episodes when a fast | | decision was needed and a limited amount of people had to carry the | | burden of responsibility. Life is hard, software development is hard | | and general rules sometimes need to be adapted to the reality. Again, | | too much generalization here for what I'm confortable with. | | | | Maybe it's worth repeating that I'm personally (and in my role) | | available to listen and mediate in cases when communication seems to | | happen behind closed doors. If you think something unhealthy is | | happening, talk to me (confidentiality assured). | | | | > ## Mailing List vs IRC Channel | | > | | > I get it, our mailing list is freaking busy, keeping up with it is | | > hard and time consuming and that leads to lots of IRC discussions. | | | | Not sure I agree with the causality but, the facts are those: traffic | | on the list and on IRC is very high (although not increasing anymore | [1][2]). | | | | > I | | > don't think there's anything wrong with that but I believe it's | | > wrong to expect *EVERYONE* to be in the IRC channel when those | | > discussions happen. | | | | Email is hard, I have the feeling that the vast majority of people use | | bad (they all suck, no joke) email clients. Lots and lots of email is | | even worse. Most contributors commit very few patches: the investment | | for them to configure their MUA to filter our traffic is too high. | | | | I have added more topics today to the openstack-dev list[3]. Maybe, | | besides filtering on the receiving end, we may spend some time | | explaining how to use mailman topics? I'll draft something on Ask, it | | may help those that have limited interest in OpenStack. | | | | What else can we do to make things better? | | | | > ## Cores are *NOT* special | | > | | > At some point, for some reason that is unknown to me, this message | | > changed and the feeling of core's being some kind of superheros | | > became a thing. It's gotten far enough to the point that I've came | | > to know that some projects even have private (flagged with +s), | | > password protected, irc channels for core reviewers. | | | | This is seriously disturbing. | | | | If you're one of those core reviewers hanging out on a private | | channel, please contact me privately: I'd love to hear from you why we | | failed as a community at convincing you that an open channel is the | place to be. | | | | No public shaming, please: education first. | | | | Cheers, | | stef | | | | | | [1] http://activity.openstack.org/dash/browser/mls.html | | [2] http://activity.openstack.org/dash/browser/irc.html | | [3] thanks to Luigi Toscano for highlighting some missing ones | | | | | | ______________________________________________________________________ | | ____ OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) | | Unsubscribe: | | openstack-dev-requ...@lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe | | http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev | | __________________________________________________________________________ | OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) | Unsubscribe: openstack-dev-requ...@lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe | http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev __________________________________________________________________________ OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) Unsubscribe: openstack-dev-requ...@lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev