I believe that the OpenStack marketing community sees comparisons to other open source cloud frameworks as significant competitive positioning. Accuracy in that data would be valuable to the whole community.
I *know* that a number of OpenStack member companies use their "position" in terms of ATC contributions as a marketing point, and having an accurate baseline for those numbers might also be valuable. For example, DreamHost has suddenly become the most substantial contributor to Quantum *ever*. :)
As for myself, I often use the count of individual members, corporate members, and total committers in sales and marketing materials - and I've found a number of discrepancies in the user database that I find concerning (duplicate names, etc.). Solid, official data is valuable for everyone - and I think inviting these other projects to join the activity board effort, by making it an openstack project itself, could be a great way to get there.
--
Joshua McKenty
Chief Technology Officer
Piston Cloud Computing, Inc.
+1 (650) 242-5683
+1 (650) 283-6846
"Oh, Westley, we'll never survive!"
"Nonsense. You're only saying that because no one ever has."
Hi Josh
On Mon 08 Jul 2013 07:42:20 PM CEST, Joshua McKenty wrote:
Stefano, it seems like we're getting a proliferation of "stats and
analysis" efforts, including Mirantis's newly
launched http://www.stackalytics.com/. Would you be up for
spearheading a new OpenStack "program" to coordinate these various
efforts?
Sure, I like to think that I'm already half-way there with the
Activity Board. Http://activity.openstack.org is the program I run now
that wants to be the 'official' way to get useful stats and metrics.
"Useful" in this context is data and metrics that are needed to manage
the community and the development teams. We don't do comparisons with
other projects and we are adding more and more features, sources and
datapoints based on the feedback from project managers and users (see
the first release of data from gerrit on the dash
http://activity.openstack.org/dash/browser/scr.html). We are working
hard to make sure that the data is correct and meaningful for
day-to-day consumption, not just for quarterly reports and flashy
announcements.
There is also a topic for the openstack-dev mailing list with
interesting discussions coming from PTLs and project managers
(http://openstack.markmail.org/search/?q=subject%3A[metrics]+list%3Aorg.openstack.lists.openstack-dev
to get an idea of what is discussed there).
I believe Mirantis started their effort before Activity Board was
available and stackalytics was born out of their internal need to track
lines of code (a metric that many in openstack-dev believe has less
priority than other data points currently missing in Activity Board).
Qingjye similarly had his own itch to scratch when he started doing the
comparison across different projects.
What problem you believe such multitude of reports not coming from the
Foundation is creating?
/stef
--
Ask and answer questions on https://ask.openstack.org