Open Stack

> > Robert - Can you say a bit about the information you'd like to gather and
> > the type of actions you're looking to inform from the survey?
> 
> Absolutely.
> http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2015-April/060745.html
> was the thread I started in April.
> 
> I had some private responses too offering more questions (I've copied
> the suggestions, not the authors name as I don't know why they chose
> private responses).
> 
> Broadly, I want to be able to get away from squeaky-wheel discussions
> when it comes to talking about our contributor base and instead have
> some readily available empirical data, so that we're not speculating
> about the likely impact of policy changes.
> 
> Its likely that with some care the survey could be useful for
> academics doing research as well (see below for one set of such
> questions), but that philanthropic angle isn't much of a driver for
> me. On the other hand, I'd rather add a couple of questions to *one*
> yearly developer survey, than have academics from all over doing
> de-novo questionnaires to all committers etc and leading to burnout.
> 
> For instance, if we find that many of our devs are new to Python, I'd
> be advocating the creation of a mentoring program to take
> new-Python-developer-mentoring load off of core reviewers. (This is
> one of the mild complaints I hear regularly from core devs - that they
> see a lot of novice-written-Python and that the education therein is
> time consuming - but is it really common, or is it a form of
> measurement bias?)
> 
> -Rob
> 
> +=====+
> My draft questions
> How many years have you been contributing to OpenStack
>   [needed to control for the next question]
> How many years have you been writing in Python
> How fluent do you consider yourself to be in:
>  - Python
>  - C
>  - Javascript
> How much time do you spend doing:
>  - operations
>  - development
>  - packaging/redistribution
> What operating system do you use to do your OpenStack development
> 
> +=====+
> - Are you coding on OpenStack as part of your daytime job
> - What percentage of your time can you dedicate to OpenStack
> - Is your employer enforcing a policy for upstream contributions
> (internal code review, require approval, etc)
> 
> +=====+
> I would love to learn a bit about how DevStack is used outside the gate:
> * Do you use DevStack as part of your everyday workflow?
> * If so, on what distribution(s)?
> * Do you run a non-default configuration WRT system services? ie, qpid
> or zmq, or psql
> * Do you run a gate-like environment using devstack-gate or something like
> it?
> * Do you regularly run a forked/branched DevStack
> * Do you run Grenade as part of your local workflow?
> 
> I think it would be interesting to also ask about some of the other
> tools developed in our community, like gertty.  Knowing the usefulness
> and adoption of these tools can help justify (or not) ongoing work in
> this area.
> 
> +=====+
> Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona asked that the questions they used in their
> 2014 paper be included to permit updating their effort model. Those
> questions were:
> 
> • (1, Selection): On average, how many hours in a week have you spent
> in the project in the last six months?
> (>40h, 40h, 30h, 20h, 10h, <5h)
> 
> • (1, Selection): How much of the time you spent in the project is
> devoted to coding? (>95%, approx. 75%,
> approx. 50%, approx. 25%, <10%)
> 
> • (1, Selection): Do you make at least one commit to the repository
> the days you code? (yes, no)
> 
> • (2, Selection): What do you consider yourself in the project?
> (full-time, part-time, occasional contributor)
> 
> • (2, Free-text box): Did you always work on the project the same
> amount of hours, or did you have different phases of commitment? If
> you had different phases, could you tell us about the various phases?
> (the graph below may help you, as it is based in your recorded
> activity in the repository)
> 
> +=====+
> Can we get some (optional!) diversity questions included? Gender (M/F/
> nonbinary), ethnicity, age, # of years experience etc, geography. It's
> important we monitor our aggregate metrics here. Maybe also an
> agree/disagree on "Diversity is important to the OpenStack community"?
> 
> %age of OpenStack time spent for work vs play? Employment status?
> Compensation? Might make a persuasive "get into this" argument if we're
> compensated relatively highly. Remote working?

As discussed on the previous diversity survey thread, I think we need to be
careful about over-reaching here.

Just because we _can_ ask questions about issues like compensation levels
and remote working (or say religion and educational attainment in the case
of the diversity survey) doesn't mean that we _should_.

There's a fine line between gathering actionable data from the community
and invading individuals' privacy, and the Foundation should be careful
not to overstep the mark IMO.

The test in my view is whether these data can used by the community to
make the community work better in the future.

So say knowing that X% of OpenStack contributors are relatively new to
python, or work mainly in operations, would clearly be actionable data
in that respect.

Whereas personally I can't see any legit *community* use for salary data
(though I'm sure recruiters would be interested ;)).

Cheers,
Eoghan 

> "(Launchpad/Gerrit/the specs process/the release process) fulfill their
> stated missions" on a scale of strongly disagree to strongly agree.
> 
> +=====+
> 
> -Rob
> --
> Robert Collins <rbtcollins at hp.com>
> Distinguished Technologist
> HP Converged Cloud
> 
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