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 <[email protected]>
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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