[OpenStack Foundation] Thinking about the mission of the user committeee

Thierry Carrez thierry at openstack.org
Wed Jan 2 10:04:49 UTC 2013


Narayan Desai wrote:
> To the first point, there is often a tone of "patches welcome" in the
> community, that is somewhat unwelcoming to users that can't or won't
> develop code. This suggests that engagement solely on the development
> terms is probably not a sustainable solution for the heterogenous
> community that is developing around openstack. I think that it is
> important to give these folks (ones that build systems, not so much
> software) a role that they can identify with as a contributor to the
> project.

One interesting point to note is that we use revision control and source
repositories for more than just "code". Documentation (RST, DocBook5)
and administration of our infrastructure systems (Puppet, *) are also
using revision-controlled repositories and do not require you to be a
Python developer to contribute.

Users are usually the best-placed to notice an error or a gap in our
docs, and (a lot of them being sysadmins by trade) they are also a
knowledgeable group to help with our server infrastructure. So "Patches
welcome" is not about saying "contribute code or you're a loser". It's
about saying "this is a project that will live or die based on
everyone's contributions" and that also applies to doc and
infrastructure contributions.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)
Release Manager, OpenStack



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