Design Summit

The Design Summit has been split into two separate elements: the Project Teams Gathering and Forum within the main summit conference. Therefore not everything on the rest of this page necessarily still holds, but the page is kept here for historical reference. For more information on this split, please see the PTG FAQ.

At Design Summits the developer community gathered to brainstorm the requirements for the next release, discuss the implementation details and connect with other community members. The OpenStack Foundation offers a Travel Support Program to help cover travel expenses.

Past Design Summits

 * Ocata Design Summit, Oct 25-28, 2016 in Barcelona, Spain.
 * List of etherpads for the Ocata summit

How does the Design Summit work?
The Design Summit is a part of the OpenStack Summit. It is not a classic conference track with speakers and presentations. Developer project teams brainstorm the topics they need to cover and get alignment on. The agenda is collaboratively reviewed and then scheduled by the program technical leads (PTLs). Those scheduled sessions can include the presentation of a few slides but are generally a 40-min long, open brainstorming discussion on a given subject or feature. If you care about a particular subject, please join. Due to the nature of the event, the schedule is a bit dynamic, so check out the summit schedule pages often.

If you suggest a session, you should be ready to moderate that session and make sure the discussion stays on track. Experienced developers will generally help in that endeavor, but you should plan to attend that session yourself.

The Design Summit is not the right place to get started or learn the basics of OpenStack. For that it's better to check the various OpenStack meetups organized by user groups around the world or attend the other conference tracks of the OpenStack Summit.

Session types
There are three types of sessions at the Design Summits:

Fishbowl sessions
Those are open sessions to discuss a specific feature or issue we have to solve. They happen in large rooms organized in fishbowl style (concentric rings of chairs). People wanting to participate to the discussion should move to the inner rings.

Work sessions
Work sessions are smaller gatherings of teams (or subteams) members to get specific work planned and done. They happen in smaller rooms organized in boardroom style.

Contributors meetups
On the last day of the summit, developers on a given team will gather for a half-day or a full-day of open discussions without a pre-defined theme. Depending on how the previous days went, the agenda might evolve.

Before the Design Summit: propose sessions
Each project team comes up with its own way of building a schedule, ultimately arbitrated by the team's PTL. Sessions are generally proposed on an open document (etherpad...) announced on the openstack-dev mailing-list, and then discussed at team meetings.

At the Design Summit

 * The schedule will be available online a few weeks before the Design Summit starts. Refer to it early, refer to it often
 * The session should start on time, be there or be square
 * The session lead starts by introducing clearly what the session is about (and what it is not about) to set expectations
 * It is the responsibility of the session lead to keep the discussion live and on-topic
 * Make the best use of the available time !
 * Collaborative note taking during the session should be done through http://etherpad.openstack.org, please participate and make sure your points are reported there
 * In fishbowl sessions, 5 minutes before the end of the session, the session lead should start making sure (s)he gets clear outcomes, work items and actions from the session
 * End on time, to give participants the time to switch rooms to the next session if needed

After the Design Summit: document outcomes

 * Document significant outcomes and post them to the mailing-list, so that the people who could not join the event can still influence the decision

Design Summit tips

 * We organize a special "Design Summit 101" session to serve as an introduction to how things work. You can find a write-up of such a session here.
 * Experienced OpenStack contributors share their tips on how to moderate a successful session on this video.