Notes from our community-building meeting

Matt Wagner matt.wagner at redhat.com
Fri Sep 7 14:21:52 UTC 2012


Hi folks,

A small group of us got together on Google Hangouts yesterday to chat
about trying to grow the upstream community. I wanted to send out some
notes on what we talked about.

In attendance: Me, Nitesh Narayan Lal, Angus Thomas, Hugh Brock, Mo
Morsi, and Justin Clift.

Credit for the idea goes to Nitesh for suggesting, and I invited a
haphazard assortment of people to attend. I think it went extremely
well, and we talked about doing this sort of thing on a regular basis,
perhaps weekly. (Thursdays at 2pm US Eastern -- UTC-0400). More are
welcome!

I was so wrapped up in the call that I didn't keep the best notes, but
here's a recap of the things I did write down:

* We should really be at more events, and/or organize more events, to
  maximize awareness about our project.

* We should think more about giving away swag at such events. It's a
  good way to attract interest, and it gives people something to
  remember us by after the fact. We've printed up stickers in the past
  (though they've been a bit elusive), but things like T-shirts or
  stuffed animals and whatnot can get a lot more interest. (I
  half-joking suggested a stuffed cloud after the call, but the more
  I think about it, the more I actually like that idea.)

* Screencasts and webinars can be an effective training tool. We have
  produced some screencasts in the past but not all of them have been
  well-publicized. We should probably find a spot to put them so they're
  easily-accessible.

* We talked a bit about doing things like a Chrome extension to control
  Aeolus. This led to a few different lines of discussion:
   - Browser plugins are automatically cross-platform, so it's not a bad
     way to go about building cross-platform clients.
   - Browser plugins are often distributed through a sort of marketplace
     as well, which could get some additional interest.
   - For any of this to work, though, we need to have a solid API that
     plugins could use. Ours is current incomplete, which hampers the
     ability for anyone to extend Aeolus.
   - We often focus on large, enterprise users for Aeolus. I think we
     have a good story for small users who just want to run one or two
     cloud instances while avoiding vendor lock-in, but I don't think
     it's something we have focused on. Making Aeolus interesting to
     individuals or small businesses could be valuable. (I imagine that
     many of us got hooked on Linux tinkering around with it on our own,
     versus using it in an enterprise setting at first.)

* virt-v2v support would be incredible. The tools already exist to
  convert VMs from one format to another; we would just need to build
  some sort of wrapper. Then Aeolus could have a point-and-click option
  to import a VM from one provider and convert it to a format for use
  on another provider. This could be incredibly valuable.

* It looks like Ubuntu is the distro of choice for many users these
  days. We're moving towards distributing our components in
  platform-agnostic ways, but we should keep in mind that RPM-based
  distros aren't all that people use. It might even be worthwhile to
  eventually try to package for Debian/Ubuntu and get added to their
  repos, so Aeolus is just an apt-get away.

* The idea of a contest for app developers was discussed, and would be
  really interesting, if there was a budget for it. (This, too, probably
  depends on having a robust API in place.)

Whew! I think that's everything. (I told you it was a productive
meeting!) Please feel to share your thoughts on these ideas and how we
might go about implementing some of them. If you're interested in
joining us next week, we'll try for another meeting on Google Plus next
Thursday at 2pm Eastern US (UTC-0400). It's a video conference, so
please remember to put on a shirt.

Best,
Matt



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