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

[Linda Kateley]

+1

I also have the names for the dutch solaris users group. I also have 
funds to host a hackathon at nexenta's oss.

linda


On 2/12/12 5:22 PM, Bayard Bell wrote:
> 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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-- 
Linda Kateley
Global Evangelist and Community Manager
(mobile) 612-807-6349
(email) linda.kateley at nexenta.com
(skype) lkateley


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