This is a really nice idea. I feel the same, that we can offload some of the 
work from the liaisons and reduce the number of syncs that need to happen. This 
can be a good source of asynchronous communication however, I still feel that 
we need to keep a good balance of both.  Also, I like the proposed scope of the 
newsletter.

Thanks,
 -Nikhil
    

From: Joe Gordon <joe.gord...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, May 4, 2015 3:03 PM
To: OpenStack Development Mailing List
Subject: [openstack-dev] [all] cross project communication: periodic developer 
newsletter?
  


Before going any further, I am proposing something to make it easier for the 
developer community to keep track of what other projects are working on. I am 
not proposing anything to directly help operators or users, that is a separate 
problem space.







In Mark McClain's TC candidacy email he brought up the issue of cross project 
communication[0]:

   Our codebase has grown significantly over the years and a contributor must 
invest significant time to understand and follow every project; however many 
contributors have limited time must choose a subset of projects to direct their 
focus.  As a result, it becomes important to employ cross project communication 
to explain major technical decisions, share solutions to project challenges 
that might be widely applicable, and leverage our collective experience.  The 
TC should seek new ways to facilitate cross project communication that will 
enable the community to craft improvements to the interfaces between projects 
as there will be greater familiarity between across the boundary. 
Better cross project communication will make it easier to share technical 
solutions and promote a more unified experience across projects.  It seems like 
just about every time I talk to people from different projects I learn about 
something interesting  and relevant that they are working on. 


While I usually track discussions on the mailing list, it is a poor way of 
keeping track of what the big issues each project is working on. Stefano's 
'OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter' does a good job of highlighting many 
things including important  mailing list conversations, but it doesn't really 
answer the question of What is X (Ironic, Nova, Neutron, Cinder, Keystone, Heat 
etc.) up to?


To tackle this I would like to propose the idea of a periodic developer 
oriented newsletter, and if we agree to go forward with this, hopefully the 
foundation can help us find someone to write newsletter.



Now on to the details.


I am not sure what the right cadence for this newsletter would be, but I think 
weekly is too 
frequent and once a 6 month cycle would be too infrequent.


The  big questions I would like to see answered are:


* What are the big challenges each project is currently working on?
* What can we learn from each other?
* Where are individual projects trying to solve the same problem independently?



To answer these questions one needs to look at a lot of sources, including:


* Weekly meeting logs, or hopefully just the notes assuming we get better at 
taking detailed notes
* approved specs
* periodically talk to the PTL of each project to see if any big discussions 
were discussed else where
* Topics selected for discussion at summits


Off the top of my head here are a few topics that would make good candidates 
for this newsletter:


* What are different projects doing with microversioned APIs, I know that at 
least two projects are tackling this
* How has the specs process evolved in each project, we all started out from a 
common point but seem to have all gone in slightly different directions
* What will each projects priorities be in Liberty? Do any of them overlap?
* Any process changes that projects have tried that worked or didn't work
* How is functional testing evolving in each project




Would this help with cross project communication? Is this feasible? Other 
thoughts?


best,
Joe








[0]  http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2015-April/062361.html  
   
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