[Starlingx-discuss] StarlingX Adoption discussions in PTG
Hello Folks, I was going through the PTG discussions and etherpads and came across the topic of community and users. Although I’m a new-ish member of the community, I’d like to highlight some things we can also look at: Discussion Forums (Discourse, GitHub Discussions): We are using mailing lists for all discussions today. Most cloud-native projects are using Discourse forums (e.g. Kubernetes<https://discuss.kubernetes.io/>, Docker<https://forums.docker.com/>, LXC, LXD, LXCFS<https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/>, etc. – virtually everyone in this space is part of a Discourse community. I want to double-stress this point actually). GitHub recently announced the Beta of Discussions<https://github.blog/2020-05-06-new-from-satellite-2020-github-codespaces-github-discussions-securing-code-in-private-repositories-and-more/#discussions>. If STX is looking to build a community there, Discussions might be a nice, low-cost place to host the community. Besides this, many communities have Slack and Discord teams. But forums are infinitely more discoverable (if we’re not talking about ad-hoc discussions). Participation in other communities + Adoption Stories: We need to be heavily present (announce CVEs, project updates etc.) in the Kubernetes discussion forums and Slack. CNCF has regular posts from adopters of Kubernetes. If we have users who have adopted STX for their edge, we should invite their architect to promote their company’s blogpost on CNCF’s blog. I think it’s great promotion for the user’s product and for the STX community. Fin’: In my personal experience: I’ve been using and talking about STX for the last 6 months. It is strange that for talking about STX internally, we’re using tools like MS Teams and Slack or Yammer/Discourse/PlanetBlue within our respective companies but the community has a 2nd class experience. In my opinion mailing lists and IRC are not the most modern way of managing large communities for modern, cloud-native projects. I’m sorry if this was already discussed some time ago and this is a repetition (Discourse has cool features to resolve these sorts of discussions btw. 😉) Best Taimoor Intel Deutschland GmbH Registered Address: Am Campeon 10-12, 85579 Neubiberg, Germany Tel: +49 89 99 8853-0, www.intel.de Managing Directors: Christin Eisenschmid, Gary Kershaw Chairperson of the Supervisory Board: Nicole Lau Registered Office: Munich Commercial Register: Amtsgericht Muenchen HRB 186928
On 6/10/20 12:32 AM, Imtiaz, Taimoor wrote:
Hello Folks,
I was going through the PTG discussions and etherpads and came across the topic of community and users. Although I’m a new-ish member of the community, I’d like to highlight some things we can also look at:
*Discussion Forums (Discourse, GitHub Discussions)*:
We are using mailing lists for all discussions today. Most cloud-native projects are using Discourse forums (e.g. Kubernetes <https://discuss.kubernetes.io/>, Docker <https://forums.docker.com/>, LXC, LXD, LXCFS <https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/>, etc. – virtually everyone in this space is part of a Discourse community. I want to double-stress this point actually).
Your welcome to participate in those forums and report back if there are issues, but I don't think we want to maintain 2 communication channels, as I believe Discourse is both a forum and mailing list combined. I know this has come up in the past, StarlingX as part of the OpenStack Foundation chose to use IRC, as you point out below, IRC has been around for a long time and it's used by many, many Open Source project beyond just OpenStack. Please come and participate in the community call [0] on Wednesday mornings. Thanks for your input. Sau! [0] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Starlingx/Meetings#7am_Pacific_-_Technical_S...
GitHub recently announced the Beta of Discussions <https://github.blog/2020-05-06-new-from-satellite-2020-github-codespaces-github-discussions-securing-code-in-private-repositories-and-more/#discussions>. If STX is looking to build a community there, Discussions might be a nice, low-cost place to host the community.
Besides this, many communities have Slack and Discord teams. But forums are infinitely more discoverable (if we’re not talking about ad-hoc discussions).
*Participation in other communities + Adoption Stories:*
We need to be heavily present (announce CVEs, project updates etc.) in the Kubernetes discussion forums and Slack.
CNCF has regular posts from adopters of Kubernetes. If we have users who have adopted STX for their edge, we should invite their architect to promote their company’s blogpost on CNCF’s blog. I think it’s great promotion for the user’s product and for the STX community.
*Fin’:*
In my personal experience: I’ve been using and talking about STX for the last 6 months. It is strange that for talking about STX internally, we’re using tools like MS Teams and Slack or Yammer/Discourse/PlanetBlue within our respective companies but the community has a 2^nd class experience.
In my opinion mailing lists and IRC are not the most modern way of managing large communities for modern, cloud-native projects. I’m sorry if this was already discussed some time ago and this is a repetition (Discourse has cool features to resolve these sorts of discussions btw. 😉)
Best
Taimoor
Intel Deutschland GmbH Registered Address: Am Campeon 10-12, 85579 Neubiberg, Germany Tel: +49 89 99 8853-0, www.intel.de Managing Directors: Christin Eisenschmid, Gary Kershaw Chairperson of the Supervisory Board: Nicole Lau Registered Office: Munich Commercial Register: Amtsgericht Muenchen HRB 186928
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On 2020-06-10 08:24:24 -0700 (-0700), Saul Wold wrote: [...]
Your welcome to participate in those forums and report back if there are issues, but I don't think we want to maintain 2 communication channels, as I believe Discourse is both a forum and mailing list combined. [...]
Having struggled repeatedly to interact with Discourse via E-mail, I can say that it's not really a mailing list. It has some features to feed you posts via E-mail and accept replies, but that is where the similarity to a traditional listserv ends. I've been exploring upgrading our Mailman servers the newer 3.x series which enables a lot of Web forum like workflows (via Hyperkitty), but can also say that it turns mailing lists into Web forums about as well as Discourse turns Web forums into mailing lists (that is to say, probably not sufficiently for folks who are seeking a real "Web forum experience"). Personally, I miss Usenet, and wish I had sufficient time to work on adding an NNTP connector for our lists. But the long as short of it is that communities use different tools to communicate, and as someone who participates in lots of diverse communities I've had to learn to do so with a wide variety of tools. Choice of communication tooling is not what makes or breaks a community, and spending too much time jumping back and forth between popular communication platforms of the day serves mostly to eat effort which could otherwise be spent improving software the community is there to produce and maintain. That the Linux kernel developers continue to use mailing lists for discussion, and even for sharing and reviewing Git commits, has not resulted in the death of their community (quite the contrary). -- Jeremy Stanley
Hi Taimoor, I agree with the previous responses regarding the communication tool comments and would reflect on the blog and information sharing topic here. […]
Participation in other communities + Adoption Stories: We need to be heavily present (announce CVEs, project updates etc.) in the Kubernetes discussion forums and Slack.
CNCF has regular posts from adopters of Kubernetes. If we have users who have adopted STX for their edge, we should invite their architect to promote their company’s blogpost on CNCF’s blog. I think it’s great promotion for the user’s product and for the STX community. […]
You may not be aware, but on the StarlingX website we have a blog section where we are actively looking for new content: https://www.starlingx.io/blog/ If you or anyone else has an adoption story, demo, or any other cool topic to share details about please share it on the community’s blog. You can add pointers to these blog posts from anywhere including the CNCF sites which helps with further increasing visibility of the project and get new content in front of those who are monitoring the blog for new stories. Anyone can suggest a new post on GitHub in the form of a pull request: https://github.com/StarlingXWeb/starlingx-website/tree/master/src/pages/blog If you need help with putting your blog post together please reach out to me and I’m happy to help reviewing and polishing the text or upload it to GitHub if you have issues with that. Thanks, Ildikó
Hi Ildiko, Saul, Sure, I do not disagree that mailing lists are functional. Discourse is so much more welcoming and information is easy to discover. If you monitor a community forum such as Kubernetes', you'll see people having fun too (showing off projects etc.). It's also a bit more realtime and meant for threaded discussions. It was just a suggestion on my end. I do not think we should compare cloud native communities with Linux. The stewards are different generations of folks and mindset are totally different. In my observation, most people do not go through the hassle of registering on mailing lists. They do however like browsing forums (I know I do).. SEO tooling also likes it 😊 I agree with the blog post idea and I'll try to get some users to write those. These things came to mind after listening to the 2nd day's PTG recordings where there was a discussion around community adoption. Best, Taimoor -----Original Message----- From: Ildiko Vancsa <ildiko.vancsa@gmail.com> Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 18:19 To: Imtiaz, Taimoor <taimoor.imtiaz@intel.com> Cc: starlingx-discuss@lists.starlingx.io Subject: Re: [Starlingx-discuss] StarlingX Adoption discussions in PTG Hi Taimoor, I agree with the previous responses regarding the communication tool comments and would reflect on the blog and information sharing topic here. […]
Participation in other communities + Adoption Stories: We need to be heavily present (announce CVEs, project updates etc.) in the Kubernetes discussion forums and Slack.
CNCF has regular posts from adopters of Kubernetes. If we have users who have adopted STX for their edge, we should invite their architect to promote their company’s blogpost on CNCF’s blog. I think it’s great promotion for the user’s product and for the STX community. […]
You may not be aware, but on the StarlingX website we have a blog section where we are actively looking for new content: https://www.starlingx.io/blog/ If you or anyone else has an adoption story, demo, or any other cool topic to share details about please share it on the community’s blog. You can add pointers to these blog posts from anywhere including the CNCF sites which helps with further increasing visibility of the project and get new content in front of those who are monitoring the blog for new stories. Anyone can suggest a new post on GitHub in the form of a pull request: https://github.com/StarlingXWeb/starlingx-website/tree/master/src/pages/blog If you need help with putting your blog post together please reach out to me and I’m happy to help reviewing and polishing the text or upload it to GitHub if you have issues with that. Thanks, Ildikó Intel Deutschland GmbH Registered Address: Am Campeon 10-12, 85579 Neubiberg, Germany Tel: +49 89 99 8853-0, www.intel.de Managing Directors: Christin Eisenschmid, Gary Kershaw Chairperson of the Supervisory Board: Nicole Lau Registered Office: Munich Commercial Register: Amtsgericht Muenchen HRB 186928
Taimoor, thank you for sharing your thoughts on these topics. Earlier in the thread you said that we should be participating actively in CNCF communication forums/etc.. - posting news, questions, etc.. I absolutely agree with that, but don't have much time myself to do so. Perhaps someone in the community could volunteer to (or may already) represent the project in those places? brucej -----Original Message----- From: Imtiaz, Taimoor <taimoor.imtiaz@intel.com> Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 11:50 AM To: Ildiko Vancsa <ildiko.vancsa@gmail.com> Cc: starlingx-discuss@lists.starlingx.io Subject: Re: [Starlingx-discuss] StarlingX Adoption discussions in PTG Hi Ildiko, Saul, Sure, I do not disagree that mailing lists are functional. Discourse is so much more welcoming and information is easy to discover. If you monitor a community forum such as Kubernetes', you'll see people having fun too (showing off projects etc.). It's also a bit more realtime and meant for threaded discussions. It was just a suggestion on my end. I do not think we should compare cloud native communities with Linux. The stewards are different generations of folks and mindset are totally different. In my observation, most people do not go through the hassle of registering on mailing lists. They do however like browsing forums (I know I do).. SEO tooling also likes it 😊 I agree with the blog post idea and I'll try to get some users to write those. These things came to mind after listening to the 2nd day's PTG recordings where there was a discussion around community adoption. Best, Taimoor -----Original Message----- From: Ildiko Vancsa <ildiko.vancsa@gmail.com> Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 18:19 To: Imtiaz, Taimoor <taimoor.imtiaz@intel.com> Cc: starlingx-discuss@lists.starlingx.io Subject: Re: [Starlingx-discuss] StarlingX Adoption discussions in PTG Hi Taimoor, I agree with the previous responses regarding the communication tool comments and would reflect on the blog and information sharing topic here. […]
Participation in other communities + Adoption Stories: We need to be heavily present (announce CVEs, project updates etc.) in the Kubernetes discussion forums and Slack.
CNCF has regular posts from adopters of Kubernetes. If we have users who have adopted STX for their edge, we should invite their architect to promote their company’s blogpost on CNCF’s blog. I think it’s great promotion for the user’s product and for the STX community. […]
You may not be aware, but on the StarlingX website we have a blog section where we are actively looking for new content: https://www.starlingx.io/blog/ If you or anyone else has an adoption story, demo, or any other cool topic to share details about please share it on the community’s blog. You can add pointers to these blog posts from anywhere including the CNCF sites which helps with further increasing visibility of the project and get new content in front of those who are monitoring the blog for new stories. Anyone can suggest a new post on GitHub in the form of a pull request: https://github.com/StarlingXWeb/starlingx-website/tree/master/src/pages/blog If you need help with putting your blog post together please reach out to me and I’m happy to help reviewing and polishing the text or upload it to GitHub if you have issues with that. Thanks, Ildikó Intel Deutschland GmbH Registered Address: Am Campeon 10-12, 85579 Neubiberg, Germany Tel: +49 89 99 8853-0, www.intel.de Managing Directors: Christin Eisenschmid, Gary Kershaw Chairperson of the Supervisory Board: Nicole Lau Registered Office: Munich Commercial Register: Amtsgericht Muenchen HRB 186928 _______________________________________________ Starlingx-discuss mailing list Starlingx-discuss@lists.starlingx.io http://lists.starlingx.io/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/starlingx-discuss
On 2020-06-10 18:50:05 +0000 (+0000), Imtiaz, Taimoor wrote:
Sure, I do not disagree that mailing lists are functional. Discourse is so much more welcoming and information is easy to discover.
"Welcoming" and "easy to discover" are matters of personal taste, and so differ widely based on individual experience. De gustibus non est disputandum.
If you monitor a community forum such as Kubernetes', you'll see people having fun too (showing off projects etc.). It's also a bit more realtime and meant for threaded discussions.
E-mail and thus mailing lists are also explicitly designed for threaded discussions, unless you've decided to cripple your communications by using a terrible mail client. My client shows me thread trees of list messages just fine.
It was just a suggestion on my end. I do not think we should compare cloud native communities with Linux. The stewards are different generations of folks and mindset are totally different.
I hesitate to ascribe ageist generalizations to communication tooling preferences. Are you suggesting that the Linux kernel doesn't have younger developers? Or that Kubernetes doesn't have older developers? What is specific to the Linux maintainer "mindset" which differentiates it from the Kubernetes maintainer "mindset" in this regard?
In my observation, most people do not go through the hassle of registering on mailing lists. They do however like browsing forums (I know I do)..
I have no problem subscribing to mailing lists, in fact I'm subscribed to many. I much prefer getting messages in my inbox and not having to go check a dozen different Web sites to read new forum posts for discussions in which I'm involved/interested. To be honest, I'd rather not start up a Web browser at all when I can help it.
SEO tooling also likes it 😊 [...]
Have any details on this? Popular Web search engines already crawl and index our list archives, and turn up relevant results from them. -- Jeremy Stanley
Hi Jeremy, I didn't mean to ascribe age to communities if that is what it came across as. I meant to say that Brendan Berns (as a steward) is different from Torvalds* and as you said it definitely is a matter of taste. I just think that many newer communities are using these tools.
Have any details on this? Popular Web search engines already crawl and index our list archives, and turn up relevant results from them. I do not actually. I think I meant to say that search engine functionality is built-in.
*Of course my impression comes from news sources. Best, Taimoor -----Original Message----- From: Jeremy Stanley <fungi@yuggoth.org> Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 22:15 To: starlingx-discuss@lists.starlingx.io Subject: Re: [Starlingx-discuss] StarlingX Adoption discussions in PTG On 2020-06-10 18:50:05 +0000 (+0000), Imtiaz, Taimoor wrote:
Sure, I do not disagree that mailing lists are functional. Discourse is so much more welcoming and information is easy to discover.
"Welcoming" and "easy to discover" are matters of personal taste, and so differ widely based on individual experience. De gustibus non est disputandum.
If you monitor a community forum such as Kubernetes', you'll see people having fun too (showing off projects etc.). It's also a bit more realtime and meant for threaded discussions.
E-mail and thus mailing lists are also explicitly designed for threaded discussions, unless you've decided to cripple your communications by using a terrible mail client. My client shows me thread trees of list messages just fine.
It was just a suggestion on my end. I do not think we should compare cloud native communities with Linux. The stewards are different generations of folks and mindset are totally different.
I hesitate to ascribe ageist generalizations to communication tooling preferences. Are you suggesting that the Linux kernel doesn't have younger developers? Or that Kubernetes doesn't have older developers? What is specific to the Linux maintainer "mindset" which differentiates it from the Kubernetes maintainer "mindset" in this regard?
In my observation, most people do not go through the hassle of registering on mailing lists. They do however like browsing forums (I know I do)..
I have no problem subscribing to mailing lists, in fact I'm subscribed to many. I much prefer getting messages in my inbox and not having to go check a dozen different Web sites to read new forum posts for discussions in which I'm involved/interested. To be honest, I'd rather not start up a Web browser at all when I can help it.
SEO tooling also likes it 😊 [...]
Have any details on this? Popular Web search engines already crawl and index our list archives, and turn up relevant results from them. -- Jeremy Stanley Intel Deutschland GmbH Registered Address: Am Campeon 10-12, 85579 Neubiberg, Germany Tel: +49 89 99 8853-0, www.intel.de Managing Directors: Christin Eisenschmid, Gary Kershaw Chairperson of the Supervisory Board: Nicole Lau Registered Office: Munich Commercial Register: Amtsgericht Muenchen HRB 186928
participants (5)
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Ildiko Vancsa
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Imtiaz, Taimoor
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Jeremy Stanley
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Jones, Bruce E
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Saul Wold