[oi-dev] Thoughts on FOSDEM and the road ahead

[Bayard Bell]

I had a chance to talk to some people from the user community at the
conference, and a lot of them seemed a bit skittish about getting involved
in development. The model I talked about with them is creating nuclea about
product areas like LAMP, dynamic language, media players. Let users talk
about what they're doing with the various pieces of technology we're
packaging or that they want packaged. Start with a very loose consistency
model: have them share blogs, and let them create special interest group
mailing lists to build communities around focused interests. For some
people, looking at the broad problems of developing a distro isn't a way
in. Talking about production, documenting what they do, and writing code to
test product stability around the operational side they know is something
they're comfortable doing. Build them up from that. Once they've done it,
they realize they can have confidence building and packaging stuff, knowing
that they've got a test rig to show them the confidence is well-founded.

My surmise is that we've got a lot of users who are--I don't want to say
conservative but production-centric. We need to help them make the
transition from being Sun customers to OI contributors. They come from an
operational background, so grow them into developers using the devops
paradigm: focus them on defining quality, then measuring quality, and then
moving the software forward.

What I'd like to propose to get us there is three things: one is doing a
survey of the user community to figure out where they are, what their
interests are, and what they expect from the project. My guess is as good
as anyone else's, but we're still guessing. Let's form some hypotheses,
write a survey that gets us data to evaluate, and get ourselves something
we can analyze more conclusively. And let's do that cross-distro for
illumos, if possible: OI, illumian, SmartOS, StormOS, etc.

Second, let's try to organize a pan-illumos userland hackathon that's also
a bootcamp. Let's target OI users and FOSS developers. We teach a package
of skills: how to build stuff with OI, how to measure stuff with DTrace,
how to test stuff with the unit testing rig Delphix is putting together
(I'm assuming we just want to steal this, but maybe I'm wrong), and how to
automate the boring stuff with Jenkins. (As much as possible, downplay
packaging in the interest of cross-distro unity: here's the common data you
have to understand for all of userland, so you know what to grok if gmake
publish fails.) If possible, fly in a DTrace rock star. Teach those skills
in a day or less, and spend the rest of the weekend using them so that
there's immediate practical reinforcement. Let people sign up ahead to work
on packages so that they come away from the event with something read to
commit and thus a sense of accomplishment on which to build.

The Nexenta OSS Europe conference may be the right event to work off of, as
it's just far enough in the future that we can make it our goal now and
keep ourselves focused making it happen between now and then. We've got
people in Belgium, the Netherlands (I got contact info at FOSDEM for the
person who used to run the Solaris users group for Holland), Germany, the
UK, Denmark, and Central Europe who could our usual suspects. Tell them to
bring friends this time. Help developers see us as a growth platform where
it's worth their time to engage with us to make sure their software runs
well our platform, which helpfully makes that a measurable question.

Third, let's designate some people to organize more locally to pull people
in. Give those people a private mailing list and let them talk about what's
working and what not. There are a number of places we can go to find
organizers, and FOSDEM provided some contacts for people willing to do
this. Again, let's go pan-illumos on this to get some scale. Encourage them
to cross-pollinate their meetings between software users and software
developers. Help them focus on DTrace in particular because it intersects
so neatly: illumos is the reference platform, but DTrace is more widely
available. I talked to a Python developer at the conference who mostly
wanted to rave about how great DTrace was, based on his experience of it on
OS X.

Our hook is that we make quality something you can hold in your hands.
That's what our community wants, that's what makes our community valuable
to engage.
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