Lately, I have been revising some of the OpenStack community’s processes to make them more sustainable. As we grew over the last 7 years to have more than 2,000 individual contributors to the current release, some practices that worked when they were implemented have begun causing trouble for us now that our community is changing in different ways. My goal in reviewing those practices is to find ways to eliminate the challenges.
OpenStack is developed by a collection of project teams, most of which focus on a feature-related area, such as block storage or networking. The areas where we have most needed to change intersect with all of those teams, such as release management and documentation. Although the teams responsible for those tasks have tended to be small, their members have been active and dedicated. At times that dedication has masked the near-heroic level of effort they were making to keep up with the work load.
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I had the pleasure last week of seeing Dan Young and Emma Jane Hogbin Westby's talk on Humane Teams at Home and Around the World at the Pivotal London Lunch meetup, and came away with a lot to think about: how different cities do meetups, the choices that we make about how we work with teams, and what information informs those choices.
It's always a delightful experience to see how different cities do different meetups. Even though it was the middle of the week and pouring down rain, over 60 people came to see the talk! The structure of the meetup is around topics interesting to tech, not necessarily the most technical deep dive. It's almost like a bite-sized DevOps Day feeling, in a really lovely space in the Pivotal office.
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When I was kid, there was a pretty cool documentary show called In Search Of…, which examined various paranormal (Bigfoot, The Bermuda Triangle) and natural (killer bees, hurricanes) phenomena and mysteries. This may seem dull for a pre-teen kid, but it was narrated by Leonard Nimoy, so I was pretty much all in.
One of the things this show (and others like it) does is avoid any real conclusions. Episodes paint a picture of many possibilities, present some counter arguments, then wrap up with a vague innocuous statement like "Is there really a Bigfoot? Only time may tell."
(Yeah, not really big on the mystery solving.)
As entertaining as this show is, it's not really the vague approach community team members want when trying to solve their greatest mystery: "Who is using our software?"
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Summer is always a busy time in tech conference season, especially for the Open Source and Standards team. In the past few weeks, we have had team members in Japan, China, and Germany. Other community teams are busy too—today AnsibleFest happened in London, and last week the oVirt team was busy helping out with PyCon Israel.
There's a little bit of a lull coming up, and several of us are taking breathers as we recover from the challenges of international travel. Right now, those challenges are fairly well-known: jet lag, language barriers, cultural differences… but there seems to be an uncertain future on the horizon, a future where travel may be potentially complicated by much greater forces, such as climate and geopolitical change.
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As part of Stormy’s ongoing blog challenge, here’s my take on "Three best features of open source events."
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How welcoming is the Open Source community? And I’m talking about Linux specifically. I would like to tell you a little bit about my experiences in last year or so. I already touched on this topic at the end of my previous post, but I would like to fully explain the problem and hopefully spark some hope. I will be saying “you” a lot, but I may not mean you. Don’t take it personally please.
I’m a former game programmer, obviously closed-source industry. I’m also a .NET Engineer (yes that is my job title at Red Hat). I work on C# stuff in Linux, I work on the Open Source .NET Core.
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After several months of Fine work by the fine ManageIQ team and community, we're proud to present you the ManageIQ Fine release! This sixth ManageIQ release is named after American chess Grandmaster Reuben Fine.
Since the ManageIQ Euwe GA, we’ve had 10 very productive sprints with a total of 1511 pull requests in the main ManageIQ repository and 4880 PRs overall (averaging 76/244 pull requests per week).
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Inside the world of Red Hat, and other open source-oriented companies, there is a recurring metaphor to try to help explain the relationship between the projects where our source software is created and the commercially available software we ship with support, training, and other value-adds.
The metaphor used is "upstream" and "downstream," where upstream code is the "source" project code and "downstream" is the refined product code. Thus, Fedora is the upstream to Red Hat Enterprise Linux's downstream, to pick one example.
But increasingly we have been noticing a certain problem with this metaphor: very few people outside Red Hat and companies in this sector of IT really understood what the whole "stream" metaphor meant. Worse, when we really looked at the upstream/downstream metaphor ourselves, we realized that it has a fairly big flaw on its own.
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Last month we ran a community blogging challenge on 
“Our developers are the seed of our community.”—Daniel Veillard