Tag Archives: rdocommunity

3 ways you find the right type of contributor and where to find them

Another one of Stormy’s questions caught my eye:

“What are 3 ways you find the right type of contributor, and where do you find them?”

Thinking back to the last few years of work on RDO, several answers come to mind:

The people asking the questions

Watch the traffic on your mailing list(s) and on the various support forums. The people that are asking the most questions are often great potential contributors. They are using the project, so they are invested in its success. They are experiencing problems with it, so they know where there are problems that need to be addressed. And they are outspoken enough, or brave enough, to talk about their difficulties publicly, so they are likely to be just as willing to talk about their solutions.

These are usually good people to approach ask ask to write about their user experience. This can often be done collaboratively, combining their questions with the eventual answers that they encountered.

If they appear to be the type of person who is implementing solutions to their problems, ask them to bring those solutions back to your community for inclusion in the code.

In RDO, people that participate in the rdo-list mailing list will sometimes end up contributing their solutions to the project, and eventually becoming regular contributors. We probably need to do a better job of encouraging them to do this, rather than just hoping it’s going to happen on its own.

The people answering the questions

In watching the question-and-answer on ask.openstack.org I often see names I don’t recognize, answering questions related to RDO. Sometimes these are Red Hat engineers who have recently joined the project, and I haven’t met yet. But sometimes, it’s people from outside of Red Hat who have developed expertise on RDO and are now starting to pay that back.

These are the people that I then try to approach via the private messaging feature of that website, and ask them what their story is. This occasionally evolves into a conversation that brings them to more active involvement in the project.

Most people like to be asked, and so asking someone specifically if they’d be willing to come hang out in the IRC channel, or answer questions on the mailing list, tends to be fairly effective, and is a good step towards getting them more involved in the project.

The people complaining

This a tricky one. People complain because something is broken, or doesn’t work as they expect it to. The traditional response to this in the free software world is “Patches Welcome.” This is shorthand for “Fix it yourself and stop bugging me.”

The trick here is to recognize that people usually take the trouble to complain because they want it to work and they’re looking for help. This passion to just make things work can often be harnessed into contributions to the project, if these people are treated with patience and respect.

Patience, because they’re already frustrated, and responding with frustration or defensiveness is just going to make them angry.

Respect, because they are trying to solve an actual real world problem, and they’re not just there to hassle you.

It’s important that you fix their problem. Or at least, try to move them towards that solution.

Once the problem is addressed, ask them to stay. Ask them to write about their situation, and the fix to it. Ask them to stick around and answer other questions, since they have demonstrated that they care about the project, at least to the point of getting it working.

When people complain about your project, you also have a great opportunity to brush them off and persuade them that you are uncaring and unwelcoming, which they will then go tell all of their friends and Twitter followers. This can be a very expensive thing to do, for your community. Don’t do that.

When people come to #rdo on Freenode IRC to ask their RDO and OpenStack questions, I frequently (usually) don’t know the answer myself, but I try to make an effort to connect them with the people that do know the answer. Fortunately, we have an awesome community, and once you bring a question to the attention of the right person, they will usually see it through to the right solution.

Moving to CentOS

TL;DR: Leaving OpenStack; Moving to CentOS; Still at Red Hat.

4 years ago, I came to Red Hat, and started as the OpenStack Community Liaison, working primarily with the RDO project, but more generally with all of Red Hat’s involvement in the upstream OpenStack project.

I took over from Dave Neary, but it took a while to actually replace him. His depth of knowledge and experience with the community were not easy to step into.

Over those 4 years, I’ve become much more knowledgeable about OpenStack – the community as well as the technology. It’s a wonderful community, with a passion for open source, for doing things transparently and collaboratively, and for doing things well. The individuals in the community have been great to get to know – both people here at Red Hat, as well as people in other organizations, and at the OpenStack Foundation. I could certainly call out dozens of individuals who have made my time with OpenStack smoother. The names that come to mind are Haikel Guemar, Stefano Maffuli, Perry Meyers, Eliska Malikova, Alan Pevec, Jakub Ruzicka, Rain Leander … see, I knew that as soon as I got started I would find that there’s no end in sight.

Rain, in particular, has really stood out as someone that was hugely passionate about the community around OpenStack, and was just such a delight to work with, particularly when we were able to attend the same events and work together in person.

This is why I’m so excited to announce that Rain will be taking my place as the RDO/OpenStack community manager for Red Hat, effective immediately. I cannot think of anybody more qualified, in skills and temperament, for this position, and I am completely confident that I’m leaving the community in good hands. One develops a lot of ownership of a project over four years, but I have no doubt she’ll take care of the project.

I’m not leaving Red Hat, though. Instead, I’m moving over to be more active in the CentOS community. CentOS is an exciting community that is absolutely critical to Red Hat. It’s the place where community projects, like RDO, as well as many others, do their development and testing, before being deployed and supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I’ll be focusing on a variety of things, including CentOS in HPC (High Performance Computing) and IoT (Internet of Things).

CentOS presents a number of challenges from a community perspective, and I’m very pleased to be more active there. It will be an interesting and challenging place to be, and I’ll be, once again, working with an awesome group of people. I’m sure I’ll be telling lots of CentOS stories on this website in the years to come, so stay tuned.

Follow RDO on Twitter at @rdocommunity and follow CentOS on Twitter at @centos to keep up to date with the two communities, as well as learn how we work together.

OpenStack 6th Birthday, Lexington, KY

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Yesterday I spent the day at the University of Kentucky at the OpenStack 6th Birthday Meetup. The day was arranged by Cody Bumgardner and Kathryn Wong from the UK College of Engineering.

UK has an OpenStack cloud that they use for instruction, as well as for research, and they’ve got a 6PB Ceph cluster hanging off of it. There were presentations about the various aspects of this cloud, and how it’s being used.

I gave an introduction to OpenStack – the Foundation, the software, and the community – for the attendees that were just getting started. Patrick McGarry gave a talk about how Ceph works.

Nassir Hussamddin closed the day with a really cool presentation about CloudLab, which is a tool shared by a number of universities that allows users to spin up an OpenStack cloud (not just a VM, but an entire cloud) on demand for testing purposes. Definitely worth looking into further.

Big thanks to Dell, the University of Kentucky, and the OpenStack Foundation, who, along with RDO, sponsored this event.