Foundation Board,
Thank you for approving the latest interop guideline during the last board meeting. As I mentioned during the last board meeting, we are going to start scoring the next guideline to be approved during the November board meeting and we are looking for volunteers to join the Interop Working Group. The current process for creating the next guideline requires talking to the project PTLs and other members of the community to determine if there are any significant changes to the projects, determining which tempest tests are associated with these changes, and scoring the changes based on interop core criteria [1]. After the scoring is complete, we discuss the results in an IRC meeting and submit patches for updating the guidelines.
If you can help and would like to learn more about the process, please let me know!
During Shanghai board meeting I would like to have a discussion with the board about the future of the interop program. With help from the community and some very dedicated people that included Chris Hoge (secretary of Interop WG, OpenStack Foundation) and Mark Voelker (co-chair of Interop WG, VMware) I have co-chaired Interop Working Group for almost 5 years. During this time the Interop guidelines have become stable, with fewer and fewer changes made in each new guideline. I think that if the board wants to continue with the guidelines as-is, with twice a year updates (or more if needed), we will need new volunteers to co-chair Interop WG and help drive the program. Another option would be to simplify the trademark program so that it doesn’t require so many volunteer hours. If it relied more on contractual assertions and less on formal technical checks requiring updated guidelines, it could be directly handled by the foundation.
In addition to the guideline maintenance and updates, there is the work involved in running and maintaining RefStack. RefStack is used to validate and submit the results, and needs constant maintenance and updates as well. A more contractual interop program would not require an overhead of maintaining an additional project.
I believe that Interop guidelines are instrumental in maintaining OpenStack interoperability, however, I also believe that we need to make the program easy to maintain and abide by.
As such, I would like to hand over the program as-is to new volunteers from the board, or simplify the program down to a contract that can be directly managed by the foundation.. After this next guideline, the board will need to decide what path the interop guidelines should take. Current process is strict and requires a lot of volunteer hours. While the program was being created and growing, we had a lot of community involvement. Once the guidelines became stable, we had less and less participation. As of last week, Chris Hoge, a key member of the Interop Working Group, no longer works for the Foundation and we will no longer be able to count on him doing a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to guideline changes.
[1] https://github.com/openstack/interop/blob/master/doc/source/process/CoreCrit...
Thank you,
Egle Sigler