OpenStack Community Newsletter – April 13, 2012

HIGHLIGHTS

• OpenStack Foundation announces its founders http://www.openstack.org/blog/2012/04/openstack-foundation-update/
• Wired/Cloudline: http://www.wired.com/cloudline/2012/04/openstack/
• InfoWorld: http://www.infoworld.com/t/cloud-computing/heavy-hitters-throw-weight-behind-future-openstack-foundation-190692
• Gigaom: http://gigaom.com/cloud/its-official-ibm-and-red-hat-are-onboard-with-openstack/
• Marketwatch (includes quotes from committed organizations): http://www.marketwatch.com/story/leading-technology-companies-support-formation-of-openstack-foundation-2012-04-12

IMPORTANT LINKS FOR THE SUMMIT AND CONFERENCE

• OpenStack Spring 2012 Schedule for Design Summit http://www.openstack.org/conference/san-francisco-2012/sessions/
• OpenStack Spring 2012 Schedule for Conference http://www.openstack.org/conference/san-francisco-2012/sessions/conference
• Parties and other social events are on the official schedules for the week
• Traning video for session leaders http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmY4cK_6NKY

OTHER NEWS

• OpenStack EC2 Compatibility http://markmail.org/message/ypcqnbo4o3nvzpal
• Hastexo presenting OpenStack at the LinuxTag 2012 in Berlin, Germany http://www.hastexo.com/blogs/martin/2012/04/13/presenting-openstack-linuxtag-2012-berlin-germany
• Monitoring Swift with StatsD http://swiftstack.com/blog/2012/04/11/swift-monitoring-with-statsd/
• OpenStack Wiki Recent Changes – http://wiki.openstack.org/RecentChanges
• Project meeting summary http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/openstack-meeting/2012/openstack-meeting.2012-04-10-21.00.html

COMMUNITY STATISTICS

This week’s statistics are contributed by Bitergia, a startup company expert in analysing open source communities. They developed for us a tool to analyse the history of OpenStack bug reports hosted on Launchpad. The charts below represent data taken from the projects: nova, glance, swift, horizon, keystone, manuals, quantum, tempest, python-keystoneclient, python-novaclient, python-quantumclient

This weekly newsletter is a way for the community to learn about all the various activities occurring on a weekly basis. If you would like to add content to a weekly update or have an idea about this newsletter, please leave a comment.

I’ve been tracking web analytics on the documentation site since we put it up in February, and I thought I’d share some of the more interesting nuggets of data I’ve mined. I believe the documentation statistics offer a crystal ball, a window showing the future of what’s up-and-coming for OpenStack. Let’s gaze together.

Flickr: pasukaru76

The docs.openstack.org site regularly tops 1,700 visits a day which is about 40,000 a month. Nearly 10% of visitors are site regulars, with 9-14 visits in a month, and new visitors account for over a third of the traffic. I find search and content analytics much more interesting than just site traffic, though.

At the top of the docs.openstack.org site is a custom search engine that searches the docs site, the wiki, and each developer doc sites (such as nova.openstack.org). The engine is fine-tuned to only show results for the Cactus release documents in docs.openstack.org/cactus so that there aren’t a lot of duplicates with docs.openstack.org/trunk. Yesterday I further expanded the custom search engine to include the documentation for projects in docs.openstack.org/incubation, namely Keystone, the Identity Service for OpenStack. As a result, you can more easily find Keystone API documentation and Keystone developer documentation. Hopefully it means those of you tweeting that you can’t find the Keystone docs while you’re out shopping with your family can now find them no matter your mobile circumstances!

Last month, the top search term for the docs.openstack.org site was Quantum, which revealed the need for our newly incubated project Quantum to add more documentation. Fortunately Dan Wendlandt is on the case and working on developer and administrator documentation now. Also, the custom search engine gives results on the OpenStack wiki for Quantum.

We also have a rather fancy implementation of custom Event Tracking so I can track search data when a reader searches within a particular manual. We have data starting with mid-June. Popular searches once someone’s within a manual are glance, dashboard, vlan, floating, and zone. Interestingly, terms like accounting and billing show up in both the individual guides search and on the main search. I can extrapolate a couple of items from this type of data:

1. People recognize project names, and the Image Service (glance) docs are embedded within the Compute book for the Cactus release. For Diablo, the Image Service will have its own set of books.
2. The Dashboard had been trending for a while, so I put the docs in the Compute books prior to its incubation. That looks to be a good decision still.
3. Accounting or billing solutions don’t exist in the OpenStack ecosystem yet, but people are certainly searching for them.

Our custom event tracking tells us that we’re also getting about 100 comments a month using the Disqus tool, and users are answering other users, which is excellent, keep it up!

One additional tracking item that I find interesting is that downloading the PDF of the OpenStack Compute Admin Manual is in the top 10 exit pages. I think people get in, download what they need, and get out. PDF output is considerably more popular than I had realized. I guess a lot of people hop on a plane and read docs or want the manual at their bedside table to go to sleep with?

Hopefully this tracking doesn’t creep you out, because the data really can help me shape the future for OpenStack documentation. You can always opt out of these tracking devices, and I’m sure some of you do. Let me know if there are any other documentation insights you would like to know.

Welcome to the end of Q2 2011 and the start of Q3 2011 (at least by my calendar). I like to share the quarter by quarter growth of a variety of community health-points with the broader community so everyone can see where the community is heading. If you have other ideas for metrics to monitor please contact me at stephen.spector@openstack.org.

End of Q2 2011 Data

Totals Data

* Missing 4 weeks of data due to measuring tool issue

I am also tracking several data points (bugs, blueprints, etc) that I publish in the OpenStack Wiki at http://wiki.openstack.org/WeeklyNewsletter.

Over the past week, the OpenStack Community Management team has conducted an online Social Media Engagement survey to better understand the needs and wants of various community member types in relation to the information available. The survey results are available, SurveySummary_06082011 with no details on the participants who answered questions.

Based on these results, we are taking the following three actions to meet the needs of the community:

1. Result – OpenStack.org and the OpenStack presence on various social networks (especially Twitter and LinkedIn) are the primary information sources of most respondents with 60% looking to receive even more information on a regular basis.

Action –  A social network plan will be drafted to better link the various OpenStack information repositories with community member information access points. This plan will drive content from OpenStack Slideshare, Vimeo, Flickr, OpenStack.org and other repositories to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Be on the lookout for this plan as we intend to ask the broader community for feedback on the various options available in this plan.

2. Result – Two community member types stood out in the survey: Participating company prospects and Active contributor prospects.

Action – A “Getting Started with OpenStack” document is planned for publication with all the information on becoming a participating company, active participant, developer, etc. This document will be visible in many social networking sites including the OpenStack home page to provide critical information for these community prospects.

3. Result – The OpenStack Forum is showing strength for people looking for information and answers to common OpenStack user questions.

Action – New marketing and promotion initiatives will be started to significantly raise the awareness of the OpenStack Forum and help drive more participation.

Thanks again for everyone that participated and if you have more thoughts on this issue, please contact Summer Fouche; or Stephen Spector.

image:futurity.org

Good news to all you community manager types still in college looking for real-world, hands-on experience,  I am looking for a summer intern to assist me in various aspects of the open source OpenStack community. The position is in Austin, TX and I don’t have funding for housing so the candidate must either live in Austin or be capable of supporting themselves; however there is a salary involved but it most likely will not cover your living expenses in Austin this summer.

Here is the information on the position:

Job Description:

This position will support the various day-to-day activities of managing a large, global open source community. An emphasis on social network data collection and analysis is an integral part of the position while also supporting the various other community activities including web content development, community member communication, event planning, and other tasks.

It is expected that a presentation will be presented to various community members at the end of the summer to educate the community on the social networking aspects of OpenStack and how the community can better leverage those tools.

Job Requirements:

Applicants for this position must have the following skills:

• Technology Competence – ability to use modern computing tools including Internet, Email, Office, and other standard Enterprise Computing technologies
• Written Communication – ability to clearly express ideas in a written form via email or formal reports
• Public Speaking – ability to create presentations using standard computing tools and present to groups of various size
• Social Networking Applications – experience with common social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter
• Analysis Skills – ability to process various amounts of data to provide insight into trends within the data

If you are interested in this position, please send your resume to stephen.spector@openstack.org by April 30, 2011.

At the end of 2010, I posted a community snapshot blog (http://www.openstack.org/blog/2011/01/q4-2010-openstack-community-snapshot/) that provided a variety of community health data-points. Seeing measurements on a quarterly basis provides insight to the health and growth of our community. If you have any ideas for other metrics to monitor, please contact me at stephen.spector@openstack.org.

End of Q1 2011 Data

Totals Data

* Missing 4 weeks of data due to measuring tool issue

I am also tracking several data points (bugs, blueprints, etc) that I publish in the OpenStack Wiki at http://wiki.openstack.org/WeeklyNewsletter.

As the OpenStack community moves into 2011, I feel it is important to take a snapshot of the community at this moment in time to better help us gauge our growth and success in 2011. Listed below are some important values that I track regularly for future comparison.

End of Q4 Data

Q4 Totals Data

I am also tracking several data points (bugs, blueprints, etc) that I publish in the OpenStack Wiki at http://wiki.openstack.org/WeeklyNewsletter.  If you are interested in having me track additional data, please contact me directly and I will add that item to my weekly tracking.