The OpenStack project is in fact many projects, developed by hundreds of people, tens of companies, used by thousands. These projects are managed via a number of email lists as well as software engineering tools such like wiki, issue trackers, version control, continuous integration, etc. From my perspective as the Community Manager, achieving a coherent view of all the information is tedious and immensely difficult. I can imagine that community members and corporate members are struggling with the same issues and perhaps even additional ones.
Thus, we are undergoing an integration project to achieve interoperability of content within and between OpenStack projects with dashboards, reports, traceability, and faceted search. We have embarked on a pilot project with zAgile, using their open source Wikidsmart platform, which is an integration platform for software engineering tools as well as other applications like Help Desk (Zendesk, OTRS, etc.) and CRM (Salesforce, SugarCRM, etc.). zAgile has some interesting customer examples using its platform to unite their environment such as SIX, the company responsible for Switzerland’s financial infrastructure.
The intention is to give the community a way to answer questions like: who’s contributing to that particular feature of OpenStack? What is that developer working on? How many work hours/lines of code went into adding that feature/blueprint? What are users saying about OpenStack? With the Wikidsmart prototype we have integrated information across different systems to give corporate and community users a unified view of all the efforts going into OpenStack in real-time. The system answers questions with faceted search of concepts across all the different repositories, tracing people and artifacts across different repositories and bug tracker in order to reconcile people and corresponding contributions.
We are excited to share with you the results of the pilot and solicit your feedback in the following ways:
- Webinar, Friday, October 5, 9am PDT / Noon EDT / 6pm CEST: we will present the pilot and gather feedback:
Register here. Watch the recording of the webinar below. - OpenStack Summit: a session is scheduled on Wednesday, October 17 in San Diego.
- Survey: tell us what you think by answering four short questions. You can respond either before or after attending the webinar or Summit slot. Fill out the survey here.
- Public Discussion: OpenStack LinkedIn Group, Twitter, OpenStack General email list, IRC, Facebook, Google+.
With the integration, we know that we can become a much more efficient project in terms of communicating to members, monitoring our progress, and getting work done. I hope you can join me in discussing this important topic, and I look forward to your thoughts as comments to this blog, in person at OpenStack Summit, and in the survey.
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