Open Stack

On 09/04/2015 10:00 AM, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
> This misses my concern, which has nothing to do with pushing
> different modes of communication into the community. The community
> is already communicating, but by choosing to not hold conversations
> where the vast majority of OpenStack currently participate, those
> subgroups silo themselves into islands or walled gardens and become
> separate communities from OpenStack.

I have the suspicion that maybe you and APlimpton are talking about two
different communities after all.

On one hand, there is ample evidence that OpenStack *contributors* keep
on coming and while I've heard that getting started is hard, IRC or
gerrit by themselves have never been really the root cause of 'hard'.
That root cause is more towards the social norms and habits of OpenStack
and objective difficulties due mostly to its size. Upstream training and
the #openstack-101 channel, plus the mentoring wiki page
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Mentors and Outreachy and GSoC are other
initiatives to help newcomer *contributors*.

In any case, there is evidence that the number of *contributors* has
kept growing in absolute numbers and across geographies. The
demographics charts support this claim:

http://activity.openstack.org/dash/browser/demographics.html

And the commit-by-timezone chart confirms the geographic distribution of
contributors:

http://activity.openstack.org/dash/browser/scm.html

Probably what APlimpton is not referring to contributors (developers and
operators who commit code and documentation) and is thinking instead of
another set of participants to the wider openstack community?

> As do I. If you can assemble a short list of specific challenges
> around our tools and/or documentation, we can get some solution
> brainstorming going in an upcoming Infra meeting and hopefully come
> away with a bit more direction:

I don't think one needs to join an in-person meeting to continue this
conversation. I think email is good enough, even better than IRC to
share deeper thoughts as we're doing on this thread.

/stef