Aeolus Developer Conference Report. ACKS REQUIRED BY NOV 13.

Matt Wagner matt.wagner at redhat.com
Mon Nov 12 16:20:07 UTC 2012


On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 05:37:59AM -0500, Hugh Brock wrote:
[plenty of snipping ensues]
> You've seen some mails over the past week about the Aeolus developer
> conference. Hopefully you noticed my youtube links on #aeolus and so
> on. We didn't do as good a job as I had hoped we would with sending
> out periodic minutes, however, so I wanted to give a brief summary
> here as well as detailing some important next steps that various folks
> at the conference proposed we take throughout the week.

I took pretty extensive notes. Do you want me to work on digitizing
them, then send them to the list + put them on the wiki?

>   "Aeolus mission: to provide superior tools and workflows for flexible
>   construction, management, and monitoring of multi-instance systems
>   across clouds."

ACK, though I prefer Giulio's version, which substitutes "deployments
across cloud providers" for "systems" here. It makes it a little more
obvious what we actually do.

> * Resolving direction and technical disagreements among the various
>   Aeolus projects has become problematic and often leads to
>   unresolved, festering problems. Therefore the group proposes that we
>   establish a Technical Cabal, charged with having short, weekly
>   meetings to set technical direction for the project and debate and
>   vote on technical and architecture details (What kind of API should
>   be used here? Does this requirement merit a separate component or
>   can it be satisfied by project X? etc.). 

My understanding was that the committee would primarily be resolving
uncertainty and disagreement, based on input from everyone.

IOW, I'm opposed to the idea of a group that meets on its own to set the
project direction and impose technical guidelines for the sake of having
them. But I'm very much in favor of having a group that works very
closely with the community and helps to resolve unanswered questions
through well-reasoned discussion.

>   Awesome (the term we, in a moment of insanity, picked to use instead
>   of "chair"). 

As an etymological note, we struggled with finding a term describing the
temporary/interim chair who would set things up initially, and, as my
name was the one where we were struggling on the term, I jokingly
suggested, "Just write '(awesome)' next to my name." We did, and the
term stuck. So I would argue that Awesome is (linguistically) just the
short-term position until a real Chair is set.

> * We agreed that in the future the membership of each Cabal would be
>   determined by nomination and on-list ACKs, and that terms of
>   membership should align roughly with release boundaries. Members are
>   free to serve for as many terms as they like however if re-elected.

I don't think we need to worry about this until next time, but if we
start getting seats that are challenged, I'd propose moving to a secret
ballot for voting (after nominations were accepted).

> * We agreed to propose a roughly six-month release cycle, subject to
>   adjustments as needed by the Release Cabal. The next two releases
>   will be on a bit shorter cycle to get us better aligned with
>   downstream release boundaries: the Release Cabal will propose a
>   release integrating Factory 2.0 and Deltacloud 1.0.x by the end of
>   2012 (i.e. two sprints away), followed by another release around the
>   end of March which will hopefully include a complete Aeolus API. The
>   first couple of meetings of the Technical Cabal will finalize the
>   feature priorities for those two releases.

In a separate conversation, we (more than once) commented that it would
be nice to have a roadmap on our site. Website Cabal, we have tasks
already!

> I'd like everyone with commit access to an Aeolus project to respond
> with either ACK or NACK + suggestions to the above proposals, and to
> the proposed Cabal membership lists, by November 13. I will consider
> failure to respond by November 13 an ACK, as well as an indication
> that you're not paying attention.

I went along with the trend, which was for people to ACK their own
presence -- in effect, accepting their nominations. There's presently no
one that I would NACK being on any of the comittees.

> Third: Matt Wagner, the acting Awesome for the Publicity Cabal,
                                                 ^^^^^^^^^

Just for the sake of the record, I'm actually Awesome for the Website
Cabal, not Publicity. I think that's Angus.

> has volunteered to collect all the presentations given and make them
> available on aeolusproject.org. I'll take charge of getting him the
> ones I already have, but if you didn't send your slides to me before,
> make sure you send them to him now please.

But I _am_ the one collecting slides. Please send me anything you
presented and I'll make sure it ends up on the site. (Please do remove
any sensitive material first, though -- I don't intend to review them
before publication.)

> Thanks once more for all the hard work that went into the week. I am
> very excited to see what comes next as we begin pushing planning and
> feature development upstream and making our releases available to a
> wider audience.

BTW, thanks to all of our Brno hosts for this trip. I had a fantastic
time, and I think this trip had tremendous community benefit as well.

-- Matt



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