On 18/09/18 9:10 PM, Jaesuk Ahn wrote:
On Wed, Sep 19, 2018 at 5:30 AM Zane Bitter <zbit...@redhat.com
<mailto:zbit...@redhat.com>> wrote:
Resotring the whole quote here because I accidentally sent the original
to the -sigs list only and not the -dev list.
As others have mentioned, I think this is diving into solutions when we haven't
defined the problems. I know you mentioned it briefly in the PTG session, but
that context never made it to the review or the mailing list.
So AIUI the issue you're trying to solve here is that the TC members seem
distant and inaccessible to Chinese contributors because we're not on the same
social networks they are?
Perhaps there are others too?
Obvious questions to ask from there would be:
- Whether this is the most important issue facing contributors from the APAC
region
- To what extent the proposed solution is expected to help
I do agree with Zane on the above point.
For the record, I didn't express an opinion. I'm just pointing out what
the questions are.
As one of OpenStack participants from Asia region, I will put my
personal opinion.
IRC and ML has been an unified and standard way of communication in
OpenStack Community, and that has been a good way to encourage "open
communication" on a unified method wherever you are from, or whatever
background you have. If the whole community start recognize some other
tools (say WeChat) as recommended alternative communication method
because there are many people there, ironically, it might be a way to
break "diversity" and "openness" we want to embrace.
Using whatever social media (or tools) in a specific region due to any
reason is not a problem. Anyone is free to use anything. Only thing we
need to make sure is, if you want to communicate officially with the
whole community, there is a very well defined and unified way to do it.
This is currently IRC and ML. Some of Korean dev has difficulties to use
IRC. However, there is not a perfect tool out there in this world, and
we accept all the reason why the community selected IRC as official tool
But, that being said, There are some things I am facing with IRC from
here in Korea
As a person from Asia, I do have some of pain points. Because of time
differences, often, I have to do achieve searching since most of
conversations happened while I am sleeping. IRC is not a good tool to
perform "search backlog". Although there is message archive you can dig,
it is still hard. This is a problem. I do love to see any technical
solution for me to efficiently and easily go through irc backlog, like
most of modern chat tools.
Secondly, IRC is not a popular one even in dev community here in Korea.
In addition, in order to properly use irc, you need to do extra work,
something like setting up bouncing server. I had to do google search to
figure out how to use it.
I think part of the disconnect here is that people have different ideas
about what IRC (and chat in general) is for.
For me it's a way to conduct synchronous conversations. These tend to go
badly on the mailing list (really long threads of 1 sentence per
message) or on code review (have to keep refreshing), so it's good that
we have another tool to do this. I answer a lot of user questions,
clarify comments on patches, and obviously join team meetings in IRC.
The key part is 'synchronous' though. If I'm not there, the conversation
is not going to be synchronous. I don't run a bouncer, although I
generally leave my computer running when I'm not working so you'll often
(but not always) be able to ping me, and I'll usually look back to see
if it was something important. Otherwise it's 50-50 whether I'll even
bother to read scrollback, and certainly not for more than a couple of
channels.
Other people, however, have a completely different perspective: they
want a place where they are guaranteed to be reachable at any time (even
if they don't see it until later) and the entire record is always right
there. I think Slack was built for those kinds of people. You would have
to drag me kicking and screaming into Slack even if it weren't
proprietary software.
I don't know where WeChat falls on that spectrum. But maybe part of the
issue is that we're creating too high an expectation of what it means to
participate in the community (e.g. if you're not going to set up a
bouncer and be reachable 24/7 then you might as well not get involved at
all - this is 100% untrue). I've seen several assertions, including in
the review, that any decisions must be documented on the mailing list or
IRC, and I'm not sure I agree. IMHO, any decisions should be documented
on the mailing list, period.
I'd love to see more participation on the mailing list. Since it is
asynchronous already it's somewhat friendlier to those in APAC time
zones (although there are still issues, real or perceived, with
decisions being reached before anyone on that side of the world has a
chance to weigh in), and a lot easier than carrying on a conversation in
real time for those who don't speak English natively. And while can
still be technical challenges with mailing lists, almost every company
allows email through their corporate firewall.
AIUI though, augmenting IRC was not the point of the proposal. Rather, I
think it was for TC members to 'fly the flag' in WeChat to be more
visible and available to the portion of the community that is there.
In that sense, It would be great to have
OpenStack community provided, simplified and well-written, written in
multiple language, IRC guide docs. Alternatively, if OpenStack community
can provide a good web-based irc client tool, that would be fantastic.
I haven't tried it but: https://webchat.freenode.net/
As I described the above, we can certainly have a healthy discussion on
what different and real problems we are facing from Asia.
However, I don't think this TC resolution is good way to do that.
Cheers,
--
Jaesuk Ahn, Team Lead
Virtualization SW Lab, SW R&D Center
SK Telecom
_______________________________________________
openstack-sigs mailing list
openstack-s...@lists.openstack.org
http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-sigs
__________________________________________________________________________
OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
Unsubscribe: openstack-dev-requ...@lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe
http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
