Vimeo and Ubuntu don't go together Can't find a decent container/encoder combo that will keep Vimeo happy. Suggestions? #

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• Dove sono finiti i fondi per il Software Libero?
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stefano for ][ stefano maffulli, 2012. | Permalink | No comment
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I’d like to discuss the needs of the international community and get a new system in place in the next few weeks. The basic needs are:

• A directory of OpenStack user groups (OSUG) that can host content in different languages: new visitors should be able to find easily an OpenStack User Group for their local area/language. If such group/language is not available, there should be an easy pointer to instructions, tools and policies to create one
• A system for the community  managers to contact the members (all members or just the coordinators/leaders?) of the international communities to coordinate activities.

Requirements

• Register users using SSO: as a user I would like to be able to associate my profile from Launchpad, Linkedin or Google to the site
• Support content in multiple languages (switch list and automatic recognition via browser agent configuration)
• Support roles: managers of the groups can add resources to the directory, members can sign up as members, anonymous can read all content
• Show activity from all groups in my own language on the portal home page
• Directory of OSUGroups, with geographic representation (be able to view the groups on a map and display also the full list of groups on a page)
• Manage content (pages) of generic interest (to host content like how to start a group, general, policies, trademark stuff, generic icons, etc)

Per each user group:

• allow users to add events, each group will expose its ical feed
• show to list additional resources for the group: mailing lists, forums, wiki pages, home page, url of blogs,
• import RSS feed from blogs to aggregate content on groups page
• display photostreams from flickr and such on the home page

Open questions

• is this all we need?
• do we want to host and provide web apps for any of the local groups (mlists, blog, forums, etc)? And if yes, should these be part of the such portal?
• can we reuse code from Ubuntu Loco portal? The code is tightly integrated in Launchpad, local teams need to be created as Launchpad Teams, it uses Launchpad as OpenID provider (bugs included). But it’s already there, it’s fairly simple and it’s a django app
• What other tools can we use for this and do you volunteer to manage such tool?

I’m interested in your opinions: join the OpenStack International Community Team on Launchpad  to discuss this further.

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Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2012. | Permalink | No comment
Post tags: community, growth, international, openstack, user groups

following @sameerverma suggestion I just got a PogoPlug Pro on ebay for $20. Will need help rooting it and make good use of it #

Got excited for Vanillaforums email integration but it's not in the GPLv2 version Bummer http://t.co/LnLICnZi Open Source as a badge #

You wanted more #OpenStack drama? There you have it: beancounter arguing who contributes more to the project http://t.co/xCwO0hAd #

Checking tides and wind forecasts, looking very good weekend I'm coming #

Most Commented Posts

• Dove sono finiti i fondi per il Software Libero?
• Notes to develop Funambol for Android in Eclipse
• The end of a phase

stefano for ][ stefano maffulli, 2012. | Permalink | No comment
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• Must use email messages as primary mean of communication
• Must allow tagging/topics for easy inbox filtering
• Must be easy to manage (dealing with spam, delivery, moderation, etc)
• Must have good looking archives, skinnable, with search capabilities and SEO friendly
• Must allow measuring activity, natively or with tools like mlstats
• Nice to have:

• SSO integration with OpenID and more
• Post new message (reply or start a new thread) via web
• Offer archive via RSS

With these in mind I started looking into Mailman, the typical answer for mailing list management. The software is known and solid although the latest stable release is old.  Mailman 2 has the advantage of familiarity: we know how it works and its limitations. Mainly I know the limitations: the web UI is scary and I can’t find a way to teach Firefox’s password manager to save the passwords for each list (it associates the password to the domain, not the full url, so I can only have one password associated to lists.openstack.org –am I doing something wrong?), the default archives are also ugly and primitive forcing us to use other archivers, like Markmail.

Mailman 3, the upcoming release, is … not there yet. I could only see mockups for the new web management UI  (called Postorius, is a django app, a client of the new Mailman REST API) and it seems that Mailman 3.0 will be shipped without an official archiver.

I looked at Sympa as an alternative to Mailman, since Rackspace uses it internally. It has most of the features we need, including the nice-to-have but it seems to be lacking the Topics (although, we should say that we’re not using the Mailman topics feature at the moment anyway). I don’t think that mlstats supports Sympa and I’m not sure about its tracking capabilities (but it stores lots of metadata in a SQL database so it shouldn’t be too hard to get information from it).

Since the mailing list archives I know all look too ugly, I expanded my search to forum software hoping that in the past years there was some progress in it. The only new thing I found is Vanilla Forums, a GPLv2 forum engine. It mixes features of the old bulletin boards format with the newer question/answer concept, embracing tags and categories. The first page of Vanilla has more meaningful content than the silly topics seen in most bulletin boards and in general I found Vanilla having a better UI than most forum software. The hosted version of Vanillaforums sports also a nice integration with email but there are no plans to release such feature under the GPLv2. The view of a thread with many responses is not exciting though: it has no hierarchy, failing at readability like all bb/forum software … and I think it’s a crucial feature that enables following long discussions. This deserves more thoughts: I know Twitter gave up trying to represent threaded discussions in a single page (but Twitter was never meant for discussions), identi.ca used to have the conversation view with grades of colors but got rid of it, Gmail doesn’t bother either and shows conversations as flat, time based sequence of messages: is it just too difficult to thread discussions like any email client used to do or what else is going on?

To me it seems that Mailman is still the best we can do at the moment even if it leaves me in a pretty sad state, stuck in 2001. I would start looking into Mailman 3 and expand the search to an archiver that we can host (like CSLA) but Mailman 2 is probably the best we have at the moment. Other thoughts?

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Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2012. | Permalink | No comment
Post tags: conversations, forums, mailing list, online discussions, openstack, software, usability

My cousin will be working on "very important joints" during London Olympics http://t.co/LWJgihG7 < congratulations doc #

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• Dove sono finiti i fondi per il Software Libero?
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• The end of a phase

stefano for ][ stefano maffulli, 2012. | Permalink | No comment
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Following up on the discussion held at the Design Summit, Thierry suggested to split the Mailing-list in order to improve the communication among developers and users. The proposal requires a significant change in the current workflow for developers and adds a new burden on the infrastructure team.  A reason to be proud of this community is that the infrastructure team didn’t say ‘no’ like many IT shops would. They highlighted what they needed in order to do a good job satisfying the request. A volunteer jumped up to help (thank you Duncan) and off we go to do something without wasting time debating. This community is effective and gets things done.

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Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2012. | Permalink | No comment
Post tags: community, openstack

I led two sessions about community and participated in another few. All have actionable items. Below are the notes I took. In the next weeks I’d like to gather comments and proceed with implementation.

How to track contributions to the community  (etherpad notes)

I showed the results of the work I’ve been doing with the metrics about OpenStack development. The plan is to build a datawarehouse that hosts data from git and the bug tracker, plus data from forums, mailing lists, IRC and gerrit. Currently the datawarehouse hosts data extracted from git. A couple of days before the summit the developers of bicho released the extension  to gather data from Launchpad bug tracker  (the job was sponsored by Rackspace). Mark McLoughlin used git-dm to gather data from OpenStack git repository, creating a good master data record for the association developer-company.

Many people liked the analysis done after the Essex release, while the weekly reports are less interesting. The other important comment is that we should all be careful with which  numbers we decide to track as these can lead to “games” to trick the system.

I gathered that it would be more  interesting to have monthly reports and more comprehensive coverage of what is going on with the project. Thankfully, Jake Dahn is working on a self service portal as a frontend to the datawarehouse (his work is on github).

Communication – IRC, mailing lists, blogs, forums (etherpad notes)

General agreement is that the developers mailing list on Launchpad has too much traffic (see the chart http://openstack.markmail.org/). The plan is to keep the Launchpad list for general discussions and move developers to a new set of lists, managed by a powerful list manager that allows automatic tagging of messages, per project. Ideally, a developer would send a message about Quantum to something like openstack-dev-quantum@listmanager with subject “foo bar”. The message would have its subject changed to “[Quantum] foo bar” and it would be delivered to openstack-dev@listmanager. Even if mailman and other list managers have this feature, implementing and running a large email server like this would require resources. The openstack-infra team would help manage the machines but the actual email server administration should be done by somebody else. We need volunteers.

The IRC channels seem to be suffering: #openstack and #openstack-dev are not helping create a sense of cohesion among developers and users. The suggestion is to keep #openstack and split #openstack-dev into smaller channels for each project. The idea is that users and developers will all hang around #openstack, finding questions to answers while the smaller project-dedicated channels will help create bonds among developers.

How to help users get answers to their questions is the main issue we discussed in the section. Currently questions come in from messages to the mailing lists operators and developers, on forums, IRC channel, Linkedin group, Disqus on docs.openstack.org and more. The general feeling is that Launchpad Answers product is not adequate for the task, mainly because it’s hard to measure anything on it and since there are now six projects where you can ask question, and sometimes the answer is related to two projects not just one.  The OpenStack forums seem to be gaining traction and should be advertised more prominently from openstack.org domain. We should investigate the possibility to use something similar to StackOverflow.

The OpenStack Planet suffers for having little visibility but, like the forums, it has lots of good content. Also, lots of content that could be in the planet, stays out because to add a blog you need to be a developer (to add your blog to the planet you need to use git and gerrit). There was consensus on adding a plugin to the OpenStack blog to manage syndication of content directly from openstack.org/blog and get rid of planet.

Panel: Expanding the Community

I moderated the panel with Boris Renski,  Masanori Itoh, Joseph B George, Tristan Goode, Yoyo Chiang and important contribution from Heng Chui and Sammy Luo from China. There will soon be a video online but the gist of the session is that we need to add more content in local languages to openstack.org, and we need to publish and keep updating the document OpenStack User Group HOWTO. Other comments were that starting a new user group is easy, doesn’t need bureaucracy and it can help companies build a local reputation as OpenStack experts.

I used a few slides to introduce the topic Growing the OpenStack International Community:

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• Planning an International Community Portal for OpenStack
• In search of a modern way to hold discussions online
• Proud member of an effective community

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2012. | Permalink | No comment
Post tags: conference, design summit, folsom, notes, openstack, san francisco

Negroni invecchiato in botte di whisky? A San Francisco, dove se no? Credici, è buono http://t.co/L86naFZL #

Most Commented Posts

• Dove sono finiti i fondi per il Software Libero?
• Notes to develop Funambol for Android in Eclipse
• The end of a phase

stefano for ][ stefano maffulli, 2012. | Permalink | No comment
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Most Commented Posts

• Dove sono finiti i fondi per il Software Libero?
• Notes to develop Funambol for Android in Eclipse
• The end of a phase

stefano for ][ stefano maffulli, 2012. | Permalink | No comment
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Then Matt jumps on the favorite topics of the cloud pundits: API! It seems that Matt is cheering for one API, Amazon’s, like the history of Microsoft in the 90s didn’t teach us anything:

One aspect of [Rackspace's] agenda is a shift away from full API compatibility with Amazon’s API, which is one of CloudStack’s major selling points, and one of the big reasons it is striking off on its own. Rackspace could easily have followed this furrow, first plowed by Eucalyptus and VMops/Cloud.com/Citrix, but doing so would effectively cede the API battle to its bitter enemy, Amazon.

The first assumption is just wrong: Rackspace’s strategy is not the same thing as OpenStack’s strategy. Besides, Rackspace has two lines of business on OpenStack and those may not be 100% aligned.

Then, OpenStack supports Amazon’s API quite well, thank you. Such support is there to help companies move away from Amazon. I’ll have you read Jim Plamondon’s comment about how Amazon should not be allowed to follow Microsoft’s strategy (and Jim knows it very well).

OpenStack and the Free Software/Open Sourcei movement is in the rare position to be able to shape the future of computing, with an API that is designed by a very large set of companies, with lots of money too. This is not a small set of hackers trying to change the world: it’s BIG. OpenStack has the chance to set a real open standard for cloud computing while still allowing a compatibility layer as a migration path for all developers that are currently stuck on the proprietary API designed by Amazon behind closed doors. Companies like HP, Dell, Rackspace, Canonical and so many others are setting together a standard API, a truly open standard that I expect can also be easily ratified by a standards body, if/when needed.

I wonder why people claiming to be open source supporters cheer for the (quasi)monopolist and try to shut down at each occasion the effort of such large community to provide the world an open alternative. What am I missing?

Most Commented Posts

• Dove sono finiti i fondi per il Software Libero?
• Notes to develop Funambol for Android in Eclipse
• The end of a phase

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2012. | Permalink | No comment
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