Close The Loop

21 Sep 2018

At the time of the writing of this article, OpenStack TC election for Stein cycle is almost at its final stage. I once joked with a friend that running for TC is like running a US congressional seat from Asia : It’ll never work. I would guess it won’t work for me this time as well given previous cycle results. But I would like to thank wholeheartly for people who had voted for me, from China and elsewhere across the globe. It is an honor to just be your preferred candidate.

I’m not supper duped about winning a seat, but rather to try to work and solve some of the problems that is common to all open source communties, not limited to OpenStack. I think I might be one of the few running for OpenStack TC that actually with a mandate. This article aims to explain the mandate.

Close the culture loop

I sorta started a firestorm in the community with a governance patch after getting back from Denver PTG. I won’t get into the back and forth of whether proprietary tools should be allowed at all or whether this should be solved via resolution. What I want to point out is that individual community members have started joining wechat, and it works better than I thought. Jokes and emoticons are all over the place, and translation support is utilized in its maximum capacity. Simple request should have simple and direct answers.

The contrast depicted above says something about the large scale open source communities:

Being only globally accessible does not mean you are a global open source community.

It only begins when people with the dominating culture starts to get out of the comfort zone and try out new things, things that might not make sense to you but does to other members of the community.

This is not a problem limited to OpenStack. Nowadays we have huge open source conference which basically tours around the world, but appearances could be deceiving. It is when people from the globe that could participate the community in the way that they feel the most comfortable with, and then gradually adapt and engage in a more traditional open source way, the loop of the culture could be view as a closed one.

To quote an initiative in OpenStack, the First Contact is the most significant juncture for the engagement to actually happen. To be there is the first step, and the next more important one is to engage and interact.

Close the user feedback loop

All open source projects suffer a similar problem: a disjoint between the devs and the user. While communities like OpenStack, OPNFV, CNCF/k8s all have developed mechanisms like end user working groups to deal with the issue, but there is still a clear gap :

there is no constraint that user could put on the development

Most of the time users just have to pray that some of their requirements got implemented and delivered.

That is why during the past PTG, OpenStack WGs and UC starts to look towards a more active role, and hopefully the TC does as well, to “nudge” the community to be responsive to the user requirements. After all at the end of the day, it is the adoption that speaks if a community is successful.

What we envisioned is to have OpenStack projects doing cycle-only or long term goals, the latter of which usually comes from user survey from UC or requirements gathering from WGs. And a “fulfillment” tag will also need to be introduced into the release note to show the user that what the project team had achieved to fulfill users’ requirements. Whether to participate in a goal or develop 1% or 99% of the requirement, is entirely up to the project team. The user could reflect their opinion via the survey and apparently those project “did less” will be certainly flagged out. If the project continue to choose to ignore the user requirement, it could face a dry run of adoption.

Closing statement

I will be working on the above mentioned two areas no matter what the result of the elections are, and also try out similar ideas in other open source communities. This certainly is not an easy job, but definitely a worthy one for open source to bring much more value to many more people.