Q: Are operators welcome to the PTG?
A: Yes! Engaged operators and developers are all contributors, helping to make our projects better. If the teams, workgroups or SIGs they are involved with are taking the opportunity to meet at the PTG, all team members should join to get work done with their co-workers.
Q: Which groups can meet at the PTG?
A: There are lots of ways to contribute. We have upstream project teams, Special Interest Groups (SIGs), pop-up work groups around a specific issue, and other styles of teams. If you’re engaged and openly collaborating to make one of the OpenInfra Foundation supported open source projects better, your team can get space to meet at the PTG.
Q: Is my workgroup forced to meet at the PTG?
A: Each team is free to decide if they want to leverage the PTG to meet or not. We encourage leaders and cross-team liaisons from all workgroups to participate in the event to encourage synchronous collaboration, but the decision is ultimately up to the team.
Q: What is the Forum?
A: The Forum is a community-driven, open design event happening at the OpenInfra Summit. It is primarily focused on strategic discussions and planning for the future of our projects (the “what”). The idea is to take advantage of having all of our community (Devs, Ops, End users…) represented to hold cross-community discussions there. That means getting feedback from users and operators over specific projects in the latest OpenInfra project releases, gathering pain points and priorities for upcoming development, proposing changes and seeing what the community thinks of them, and recruiting and onboarding new team members.
Q: What is the difference between PTGs and Forums?
A: The Forum is a part of the OpenInfra Summit. It has a pre-announced schedule, organized in 40-min slots to discuss specific topics. The Forum takes advantage of having a larger cross-section of our community present to gather wide feedback on strategic issues, helping to shape the future of open infrastructure and set priorities for each project. At the Forum, we discuss the “what”, we take the pulse of the community, we engage outside of our existing teams and established contributor base.
In contrast, the PTG is more to discuss within our contributor teams, between people engaged to actively work on making OpenInfra projects better. At the PTGs, we discuss the “how”, get agreement, build trust, assign work items and get work done. The PTG is dynamically scheduled during the event itself, to give teams a lot of flexibility and maximize productivity.
Q: Are ops and devs still needed at the OpenInfra Summit?
A: Operators and developers are still very much needed at the OpenInfra Summit. The Summit is where all of the OpenStack community gets together and where the feedback loop happens. All teams need to be represented there, to engage in strategic discussions, collect the feedback on their project, communicate about their group work, discuss cross-community topics, reach out to new people and onboard new developers. We also very much want to have operators and developers give presentations at the conference portion of the OpenInfra Summit.