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Operations/Meetups

< Operations
Revision as of 06:20, 7 January 2015 by Fifieldt (talk | contribs) (Moderators Guide)

Ops Meetups give people who run clouds a place to congregate, swap best practices, ideas and give feedback. It has a mostly round table/working/discussion session feel, with only a small number of presentations, with the following aims:

  1. Gather feedback on the issues that come up in running OpenStack and work to communicate this throughout the community
  2. Create a forum in which to share best practices and architectures between interested parties
  3. Increase constructive, proactive involvement from those running clouds

Ops Meetups are typically held as part of the 6-monthly design summit, and also once "mid-cycle". Previous and upcoming Ops Meetups are listed below:

"M" release (Tokyo, November 2015)

Mid-Cycle (?, 2015)

  • TBC

"L" release (Vancouver, May 2015)

Mid-Cycle (Mar, 2015)

Kilo (Paris, November 2014)

Mid-cycle (San Antonio, August 2014)

Juno (Atlanta, May 2014)


Mid-Cycle (San Jose, March 2014)

Moderators Guide

Thank you very much for stepping up to be moderators at the ops meetup. Your work is key to our success!

You are in control of your sessions, however, this document lay down some ideas about what we've seen in the past makes a good session, in case it helps.

We have two different types of sessions this time. Many of you will have been to the Monday-style, but only those who came to the most recent ops meetup will have experienced that on Thursday. Below, I've separated them out so you can read what's relevant to you.

All sessions are now listed on [1] - if you can, please advertise your sessions to the right people

We have three overall aims:

  1. Gather feedback on the issues that come up in running or using OpenStack and work to communicate this throughout the community
  2. Create a forum in which to share best practices and architectures between interested parties
  3. Increase constructive, proactive involvement from those running or using clouds


General Sessions

Basically, it's you, an etherpad[2], and room full of a couple hundred people who have OpenStack experience. As the moderator, your work results in actionable things we can work on, and the satisfied audience.

  • Introduce yourself to the audio guy or gal. You'll be provided with a microphone and asked about laptop connection.
  • The best thing to do is convince one of your friends to control the laptop. Get them to control the display of the etherpad, and if it gets big, scroll up and down to ensure the most relevant parts are seen.
  • At the start of the session give a 30 second intro to the etherpad, and ask everyone to take notes. (Many attendees will not be used to etherpads)
  • Kick off the discussion on time, perhaps by starting with some open ended questions, or a show of hands to understand the audience
  • Aim to get it to that nirvana state, where the conversation continues without your help
  • Don't fall into Question and Answer mode - just because you're up the front of the room, some people might expect you to do this. Steer back toward discussion always.
  • There will be microphone hogs. Do not be afraid to cut them off. Using language like "Thank you, that is important, we have recorded that on the etherpad" will mean there'll be no hard feelings.
  • If you see a nice transition between different topics, take it!
  • Most importantly: try and aim for every discussion to have at lease one action item - something we can work on. If we don't do this, people are going to stop coming to these things


Overall, have fun! Also *be* fun! If you get bored, the audience will sense it - so if it happens start a new topic Spontaneity is good! Asking people to do things (file a bug, start a mailing list post) is good!


Working Groups "Small, working sessions"**

These sessions are for a focus on specific topics, and they are long sessions (normally 80 minutes) so you can actually, legitimately get work done - not just talk.

You'll have yourself, and a small group of people who are experienced with OpenStack and actually very interested in getting involved. It's your job as facilitator to try and convert each and every one of these people into a proactive member of your working group, ideally continuing their tenure well after the summit.

Since these are mostly longer session, and about much more specific things, it requires a bit more planning. For some of the groups, you will have met before and have work and processes to continue. Try and seed your etherpads with this information prior to the session.

Try and think of some concrete things that can be done during your time, but also be ready and open to the suggestions of the attendees. If there's a great idea that everyone believes in, go for it and get it done. File bugs. File blueprints. Submit patches. Write documents. Use the whiteboard. You have time for all of this


Of course, all of this information is general. You are the rockstars here - do whatever you think is best I'll be on hand for much of the two days for assistance. I'm on +886 98833 1200 if anything goes horribly wrong.

There are also a few sessions which are a bit different...

Architecture Show and Tell

This is a series of lightening talks