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rbowen / rdo_rhelosp.md
Created January 20, 2015 17:07
RDO vs RHEL OSP

Community vs Commercial

When I talk about Red Hat's involvement in RDO (http://openstack.redhat.com/) the question I often get is, "doesn't that undermine sales of RHEL OSP (Red Hat's paid OpenStack offering)?"

Well, it's complicated.

What's RDO?

@rbowen
rbowen / rtfm.md
Last active May 3, 2022 04:54
Read The F* Manual? Write a better f* manual.

Definition: RTFM - Read The F'ing Manual. Occasionally it is ironically rendered as Read The Fine Manual. A phrase uttered at people who have asked a question that we, the enlightened, feel is beneath our dignity to answer, but not beneath our dignity to use as an opportunity to squish a newbie's ego.

Have you noticed that the more frequently a particular open source community tells you to RTFM, the worse the FM is likely to be? I've been contemplating this for years, and have concluded that this is because patience and empathy are the basis of good documentation, much as they are the basis for being a decent person.

First, some disclaimers.

Although I've been doing open source documentation for almost 20 years, I have no actual training. There are some people that do, and there are some amazing books out there that you should read if you care about this stuff.

First, I'd recommend [Conversation and Community](http://www.amazon.com/Conversation-Community-Social-Web-Documentation-ebook/dp/B00C7CC

@rbowen
rbowen / gist:45c47fad9836c1e33e0e308a3d1948aa
Last active February 14, 2017 17:49
<html>
<head>
<title>OSAS Stories</title>
</head>
<body>
<script>
$("form :input").attr("autocomplete", "off");
</script>
@rbowen
rbowen / betterfm.md
Last active February 5, 2017 09:15
RTFM? Write a Better FM

RTFM? Write a Better FM.

Have you ever noticed that the communities where you’re told the most frequently to RTFM - Read The F* Manual - are the same ones where that manual is likely to be awful? I believe that this is, in fact, not merely correlation, but also causation - that is, the attitude results in the poor docs.

The Setup - Why we need a better manual

There’s a few commonly held beliefs about documentation for software, and in particular open source software: 1) It’s awful, 2) Nobody ever wants to write it. 3) That’s just the way things are, and we can’t do much about it.

The reality, however, is that there are lot of people that want to write documentation, and we, the gatekeepers of open source projects, just make it too hard for them to do it. We put up artificial social barriers. (For example, the myth that documentation is a somehow less important contribution than “real” code.) We put up strange workflows. (Get a checkout. Make your changes. Make a diff. Subscribe to a mailing list. Sen

@rbowen
rbowen / rdo_metrics.md
Last active August 31, 2015 15:41
RDO Community Metrics

RDO Communtiy Metrics

The raw statistics for this summary, including graphs, may always be found at http://tm3.org/rdostats/

Downloads

Downloads are always a tricky thing to track, but they are a reasonable proxy for the total size of the community, given certain caveats, and understanding that 1 download != 1 installation.

  • Week of August 24, average 4009 downloads per day
  • Week of August 17, average 3410 downloads per day
@rbowen
rbowen / bigtent.md
Last active August 29, 2015 14:25
Big Tent

The OpenStack Big Tent

OpenStack is big and complicated. It's composed of many moving parts, and it can be somewhat intimidating to figure out what all the bits do, what's required, what's optional, and how to put all the bits together.

The Problem

In the attempt to tame this confusion, the OpenStack Technical Committee defined what's part of the Integrated Release and what's not, so that you, the consumer, know what's in and what's out. One of the unintended side effects of this was that new projects were treated as second class citizens, and had trouble getting resources, developers, and a seat at the table at the developer summit.

As OpenStack continues to grow, this became more and more of a problem.

@rbowen
rbowen / rdo_centos.md
Created July 14, 2015 20:10
RDO and CentOS

RDO is OpenStack packaged by and for the CentOS community

CentOS cares about OpenStack

@rbowen
rbowen / get_meetups.py
Created May 29, 2015 19:16
meetup.com api
#!/usr/bin/python
import datetime
from datetime import date
import urllib2
import json
import time
import re
# Magic
import sys # sys.setdefaultencoding is cancelled by site.py
@rbowen
rbowen / kilo-cloud-sig.md
Last active August 29, 2015 14:21
Cloud sig announce

The CentOS Cloud SIG is pleased to announce the availability of OpenStack Kilo package repositories for CentOS 7, and Juno repositories for CentOS 6. These are the result of the last few months of work by the Cloud SIG membership, and, of course, we owe a great deal of gratitude to the upstream OpenStack community as well.

The CentOS 7 Kilo repository may be found at http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/cloud/x86_64/

The Juno CentOS 6 repository may be found at http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6/cloud/x86_64/

The actual -release files will reside in Extras, so that you can yum install centos-release-openstack-kilo for Kilo and yum install centos-release-openstack-juno for Juno, without needing to mess with repo configurations.

See also the Juno EL6 QuickStart at http://wiki.centos.org/Cloud/OpenStack/JunoEL6QuickStart

@rbowen
rbowen / projector.md
Last active August 29, 2015 14:20
Projector