Myth: Project Teams Gatherings (PTGs) are working events organized by the OpenInfra Foundation only for OpenStack developers to collaborate on an upcoming release.
Let’s break that down.
Project Teams Gatherings (PTGs) are working events organized by the OpenInfra Foundation: CORRECT. PTGs are only for OpenStack developers to collaborate on an upcoming release: WRONG.
While PTGs are for OpenStack developers, attendees form a broader group to make the event successful. This includes operators who are running projects in production, plan to run the project in the future or projects they have feedback for. Even if you are running an older release of OpenStack, your feedback and questions and opinions are still incredibly valuable!
Who should attend a PTG?
First of all, any open source project is welcome to participate in the PTG. Typically, the majority of attendees are from an OpenInfra project—OpenStack, Kata Containers, StarlingX—but other adjacent communities are also invited and encouraged to attend.
It’s also not limited to upstream contributors. Any team can participate in the PTG—that means that its not just projects, its also SIGs, Working Groups, pop-up teams and other forms of collaboration! There are of course the usual suspects that typically attend—contributors from OpenStack, StarlingX, and Kata—but subteams within those projects also can meet (RBAC pop-up, Nova, Neutron, Manila, Large Scale SIG, etc), in addition to Foundation level working groups like the Edge Computing Group and Diversity and Inclusion Working Group who also participate.
These teams group source their agendas after they sign up to attend, so if you are interested in bringing up a topic with them, please do! Many of the teams use etherpads to collect topics and then gauge interest levels of people planning to attend before organizing the dicussion topics into a schedule. While they are doing this collection of topics, they are also signing up for time + space to meet, so if there is a topic you want to talk about but you can’t be there, let them know in the etherpad so they can try to accomodate your schedule!
You are encouraged to attend as many groups meetings as you would like. Different teams will be meeting throughout the week. As an example, it’s totally okay to attend Nova discussions in the morning before headed to the Zuul room after lunch and then pop over to the Cinder room for a particular discussion on CEPH that you are interested in. Teams try to expose the topics they are actively talking about and planning to talk about next via the PTGBot- more on that later.
Specifically, how should OpenStack operators participate at PTGs?
Of course there will be topics that are more specific to operations and using OpenStack clouds that might not fit into any particular team or group signed up, the OpenStack operators are a team and are encouraged to sign up for time/space just like any other team. You can group source and manage your own agenda and use the PTGBot just like any other team. If there are topics you want particular people to participate in, you can invite representatives from those projects to join in those topics as well.
The key to success here is to be as open and flexible as possible. Sometimes you might need to hop into a different room to attend a particular discussion and sometimes you might need to poke at people to come to the critical mass you already have assembled for a topic. What’s important to remember is that we are all just subteams hoping to make open source and OpenStack a better projects.
I’ve reached out to a few of the project teams who are participating at the October PTG to highlight the impact operators can have on already scheduled meetings. I encourage you to follow along as we hear what these teams have planned and what you can get out of attending the October PTG.
We look forward to seeing EVERYONE at the PTG in October! Registration is currently open and free to everyone who would like to attend. If you haven’t signed your team up yet, do it now by August 26!
Have questions? Ping me on the OFTC network on IRC at diablo_rojo.
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