 All right, good morning. Thank you so much for coming to this session. If I don't live in the US, how do I become a significant contributor to OpenStack? So you heard from Mark this morning that OpenStack is becoming more and more diverse a community, which is great news. And like for this summit, we actually see a lot of attendees coming from Europe and Asia pack, probably more than people coming from US. So, and then since we have a small audience and I'd like to keep it interactive, first of all, I'd like to introduce our panelists and I'd like to thank them for their time. And first of all, I'd like to introduce Yet Lu. Hi, everyone. Yeah, and Aya. And Roland and Takashi-san, all right. And so my name's Annie Lai. I'm based in US, but originally I'm from APAC. And let me just introduce myself a little bit first and then the panelists can introduce themselves. And I've been involved in OpenStack for a little bit over a year. And I sit on OpenStack board. I'm a Huawei school membership representative and I also participate in various work groups like product work groups, enterprise work groups. Recently there's an interoperability challenge work groups. So I used to be a coder, but I stopped coding and I started doing more of evangelism, marketing strategy work. And so I do get involved in more of the work group level and at the board level. And that's my involvement in OpenStack community. And now I'd like to ask the panelists to introduce themselves and please introduce yourself and let the audience know where you're from, which region you're from, how long have you been with the community, OpenStack community and your role in the community. And last, please tell a joke about your region. Okay, a funny story. Oh yeah, it has to be really funny. Yeah, not Donald Trump funny. Okay, Yielu, why don't you go ahead? Everyone, I'm Yielu from China. I work for CUNA and I have been involved in OpenStack for like four years since 2012 and I was, I am the investor in China. And my company used the OpenStack for like, since the very early stage seems grisly and a funny joke, I don't think so. But I can tell some numbers about OpenStack in China. Like we got the subuser award in this morning, the China Mobile and we got, here is the specific some numbers of OpenStack status in China. We got the second market in the world, just a little bit less than the US, maybe I don't think so. And the code contribution and the node deployed in OpenStack and all the second in the world, just a little bit less than the US. Yeah, that's the facts, thank you. Roland? Yeah, I'm Roland Chan, I'm based in Australia. I work for Aptira, which is an OpenStack services company. I guess a funny thing, well, a funny thing about me, but I used to be a technical person and I run a software development team. But I had to back away from being technical because my staff wouldn't let me touch anything anymore. It was getting too dangerous. You can only blow up so many servers before your staff step in and force you to really concentrate on being management. Okay, Aya? So, hi everyone, my name is Ayal. I'm from Wally's Israeli Research Center. I'm the cloud CTO there. I've been running, building and running OpenStack engineering teams for more than four years now, working on various projects such as Cinder, Swift, Glantz, Neutron, and also projects we initiated ourselves like Dragonflow and Carbur. No joke, but an interesting tidbit about Israel. So, most Israeli Jews have dietary restrictions. We call it eating kosher. And in Israel, the stamp, the glue on the postal stamps is actually kosher, right? Hi, my name is Takashite from NAC Corporation Japan and I'm also very early stage, from a very early stage managing the community team of NAC. NAC is now about 20 engineers are mainly contributing work to the OpenStack and now we are lacking inside the top 10. So, that I'm there, there are many times coming to the OpenStack summit from very early, but this time from last week I have some cold. So, I cannot drinking alcohol these two or three days. So, that's very clear and that's very understandable for tomorrow's keynote. Okay, well, thank you panelists. And I just wanna say the reason I invited this for panelists is because they actually, I think they are doing a very good job being really integrated into the community. And so, for example, I work with Yetlu on the Chana Day event and she was pretty much the glue that glue everyone together and she knew the community. She actually knew the DNA of the community and so that really helped. And then, Roland is sitting on the OpenStack board for a few years already and he always has really good ideas at the board level and people really respect him at the board. And Aya is also has been involved in OpenStack for a long time. In fact, he has a team of really good people and they can really do good projects and their projects always get accepted by Big Ten. You know, except it's a Big Ten project by TC. So, he really knows the trick. And then Takashi-san is the NEC's Go membership representative and NEC is also a very big contributor in OpenStack and so Takashi-san is also very much involved at the board level. So, hopefully we can all pick up some tips from the panelists. And before I start, I'd like to find out about the audience. I want to know where you are from. Can you raise your hand for people who are from Europe here? Good. And Asia Pack. Latin America. Oh, great. We see people from Latin America. Oh, wow, good. Is that a soccer shirt? It looks like a soccer shirt. And how about the rest? Africa? Antarctica? Australia? Asia Pack. Asia Pack, that's right. Well, not going there. Okay, great. So, I'm really glad to see OpenStack is so diverse and I think that actually makes OpenStack very unique because of its diversity and more and more we're seeing co-contributions coming from countries, regions outside of US. However, we still face that challenge as someone who does not live in the US because OpenStack came from US, right? It's very the original members and original group of developers from US and they are like the old guards there and somebody new or somebody who's outside of US and I feel like we all face a little bit of challenge at least in the beginning, understanding the community and trying to really get integrated. And so I would like to kind of explore this topic and hopefully we can learn from each other and then also give maybe give the foundation some ideas of how we can really modify and add some kind of work groups or anything like that to make some changes to make OpenStack a lot more accessible, the community more accessible to newcomers and to people who live outside of the US. Okay, my first question for the panel is, describe the common challenges from, I mean probably not you because you have gone through that hurdle but from the people that you know that when they try to get involved in OpenStack and what are the challenges that the reasons why they don't feel they are fully integrated into the OpenStack community or they cannot become the significant contributor or the leader, one of the leaders in the OpenStack community who would like to start. Okay. For the developers in China maybe the main problem is also the connection between the global developers and the local developers. The one reason is language all the time or other problems but another one is the local requirements, the local needs for the OpenStack. Maybe the business models is different than the US. Then the architecture can vary from the models in the US but how can we pass the needs to the foundation or to the tech committee? This is a main challenge for us to do and we are still trying to figure out as in Huawei and Intel we have hold the box match and the Hexen twice a year it's kind of like build a connection or a bridge to the local people and the global people but I don't think that's enough to pass the needs. I think there is still a long way to go and another challenge I want to tell is that the challenge from inside. Actually I'm not working for an OpenStack company it just focus on OpenStack we are a travel agent company as my company named Kuna we are not OpenStack startups or OpenStack companies so it's really hard for me to balance the marketplace. Some companies in China they're trying to do some wrong PRs on OpenStack's branding so it's really hard for me to balance them and to try not to hurt the community for the other startups the small startups from the big ones some challenges like that. Yeah, okay. Next, Roland. Time zones are obviously a huge problem that's something that I run into all the time trying to attend a board meeting at four in the morning it wasn't always a lot of fun. And I think if we're talking about participating with an existing say a development team in the US that's predominantly made up of people in the US then that's obviously going to be a huge challenge you will lose a lot of sleep and that's kind of unfortunate I think. But sort of unavoidable I mean if the majority of the team is in time zones a long way from you there's really not a lot you can do you will need to spend time interacting with them in real time. I think an important thing is to try and make that interaction as efficient and clear as possible. And we're just talking about teamwork here and an important part of having a functioning team is that the team members can relate to each other and know each other reasonably well and then personally I find trying to communicate effectively with someone that I've never met before over IRC is difficult because you don't have a feel for their personality you don't have a feel for the way that they express themselves particular I guess idioms or something. And so I prefer to do a lot of communication long form communication like meetings as opposed to just writing notes. I prefer to do that over a different medium than IRC prefer to talk to people even if possible to use video because you do pick up a lot more nonverbal signals that make communication clearer and I think more efficient. I know there's been some a lot of discussion in the community about deviating away from sort of a common use of IRC. I don't think that's I think it's sort of the norm IRC the norm it's kind of the lowest common denominator it's kind of available regardless of what you're doing it doesn't require any special licensing but yeah I don't think it's necessarily the right way to communicate for all reasons. So yeah I think that's it's important to get to know the people that you're working with the summits are great for this so it's good to see people coming from all over the world to these summits and maybe getting to know people that they're working with as contributors but when you're joining a new group I think something that we could do is find a way to provide some sort of orientation to a new member a new contributor and get and introduce them over something that's a little more interactive and a little more human I guess than IRC. Yeah, Aya? Sure so I definitely agree with Roland I think communication is the key point beyond the language barrier which is difficult for non US citizens to begin with. Many new contributors and I'm focusing on engineers right sending patches so they attribute malice when they get reviewed they try to send a patch and in order to get a patch accepted you need to go through dozens of patch sets you need to revise it again and again and at some point new newcomers to the community think okay the reviewers just politically don't want these patches they are doing this deliberately they're against me et cetera and it's very difficult to get engineers to realize look focus only on the technical side right they're not doing this on purpose this is the way it goes right and you just need to bear through it until your patches get accepted until the person on the other side gets to know your coding style until they get to know that you actually know what you're technically doing until you build a relationship and they start trusting your code more so they do less meticulous reviews things like that so this initial period takes time and a lot of patience on both sides and I think that's a big block for many newcomers and many people drop out on the way because they can't stand that they're used to writing a patch and close source getting it reviewed once and it's merged right and doesn't work like that way here yeah I also comment about the communications from Japanese or many engineers cannot speak English very well so the first barrier is in English and the second barrier is our time difference between the US and some other meetings for instance many ILC meetings are held from our time in the midnight so there is no impossible but some engineers this time is a private time for them and from a company side or a manager that can force them to attend the midnight ILC meeting from the data to your work that's a very complex problem between... From my side that is not a specific problem outside the US but motivating and motivating the engineer to becoming more open to the open communities saying the opinions or saying their targeting architecture or their use cases so in many Japanese engineers or something like some shy people so there cannot be possible to say less opinion to some native English speakers that is very difficult to say so we are some motivating the engineer to say that some failure or some mistake is acceptable for us and some many engineers are thinking about contributing to the community or also contributing to some company's business but that is not so equal, not equal in the community there are some, I'm mainly saying that especially young engineers focusing on the committee work not thinking about the business but not thinking about the users users are important but my company's business is... Business oriented, yeah. That is very important for us to create some significant engineers and contributors to the communities. So I'd like to summarize so far we focus on the challenges and I can see the number one issue is communication, the language and the number two issue is tools and IRC and that kind of stuff and the third issue is time zone it's really hard for people who live outside of the US time zone to really accommodate the time zones which are more easier for the US community members and the number four thing is culture, culture difference and I'd like to open up to the audience is there any other challenge that you are facing that have not been discussed here? Just you can shout it out and I can repeat to everyone. Is there any other challenges besides the ones we just covered? Okay, if not, so for the next 10 minutes or so I would like to focus on the solutions how we can find solutions that's brainstorm maybe some of us can take those suggestions to the various work groups and then see how we can implement them just so at least we can make it easier and the number one issue is language communication and you know, I have a joke we actually share one common language does anybody know the answer? Doesn't matter where you live it opens that, huh? Python right, we share that language right so but there's some truth to it right because we're all writing in the same language and so what do you think I mean language is not a special word for Huawei or Chinese company, right? And I know we have a lot of smart PhDs and you know developers and but the thing is and if you ask them to read the code they understand totally but then you know sometimes they have issues communicating with some developers in US and so I'm just wondering and it's not the language is not something they can fix overnight you know and but then we don't want to use the language as a barrier we want to see how as a community we can still empower, enable all those you know non English speaking people to be integrated into the community easier does anybody have any solution? I don't have good solutions for this right but I can tell you what we've been doing in Huawei to try to mitigate this problem so actually my team in Israel is kind of a bridge between China and the US both from time zone perspective and from language perspective culturally we have a lot of commonalities with China and it's easy for us to communicate also we go and have lots of face-to-face meetings which always make things easier and what we've been doing actually is we've been sitting with engineers in China and trying to understand what their problems are and then communicate them back more effectively to people in the community with whom we've already built relationships so in Huawei we act as kind of a bridge but this is not a global solution right this is not a good solution it's working for us locally but it's actually I do think it is a pretty good solution for companies you know I mean most of you have you know work for a company right and you do have a team of people who contribute to OpenStack and I find it actually very common that for non-US companies and generally they do have a few people who are more fluent in English and who actually communicate with the community a lot more so these people can be the bridge right and get the information and from the community from various work groups from various projects and then communicate back to their developers who don't feel comfortable communicating English that much so that's one option and personally I think there's another option well another option that I think that has been working pretty well is what Yetlu talked about earlier in China, Huawei and Intel we have hosted four hackathon events and we do hackathon twice a year and we get all these Chinese developers come in right together so from various vendors come in and then we teach them certain things and then ask them to fix certain bugs and give them some specs and stuff and in Chinese and everybody can work together help each other and then the end of the day they produce Python code so that works right if you have a community you know who are the members who feel more comfortable speaking in certain language you can still do the open source work open stack work together and then write code and then you know have people helping out each other and then you know generate code and be productive I think that's also an option have a regional event you know where people can speak their own language I think that's an option too that's just my opinion something else I think that's been hanging around as an idea in the community for a while is to improve I guess the I don't like the word but to improve the sort of onboarding documentation that's part of the very open stack websites the information on how to contribute effectively that's the sort of general across all projects and specific information about particular projects it tends to be well it's not consistently organised if it's organised at all it can be hard to find and I think some effort has gone into trying to resolve that but it hasn't been really a priority with the the community and obviously so because you know documentation is never a developer's favourite job right so it's difficult to try and solve that problem but I think putting more effort into making that probably purely technical information available in a consistent way and to make it easy to find for new contributors you know would definitely be a helpful thing to maybe not to just to ease that there's enough barriers for enough pain for a new contributor to go through not being able to find stuff really ought not to be one of them it's you know you have to overcome all these other barriers of time zone and language and culture you don't need the raw information to be hard to find as well I think that's a really good point translation you know I would like I think a lot of solutions fall onto the burden of the vendor the companies right because the companies want to empower their developers be more effective working in the open-set community so the companies can actually come up with some of the initiatives for example translations I think if the vendors outside of US can contribute to the translation work then their you know members can benefit from translated documents and I think that's going to be a lot easier easier for the new members to you know on board and to be more integrated into the open-set community and I do have a question though I mean a lot of people think oh translation is boring it doesn't count towards anything and does anybody have any answer on whether translation can be counted as line of code you know so they can the translation work can be recognized does anybody know that answer I think that question came up about two or three summits ago yeah and I believe you do get ATC status good for doing translation work I remember seeing a presentation of the board meeting on Monday where from from Deutsche Telekom and they would be contributed to translations I don't know if Huawei does the same thing too but I think that's an important thing for you know for the companies that have a lot more resources yeah to localize as much as possible so that their their staff and their customers and the whole ecosystem in the area has access to to native language documentation that's a good point or anybody else maybe I think the solution is kind of like for the languages kind of hard but I think that's what we're going to do is to minimize the the like the barriers or the disadvantage to the language bring that to us like we can set up the the channels just during just between the local groups and we can find some you know like the interface to the global community and people can turn to the interface all the people all the co-members all the PTOs in the local group and they can ask our turn help to the global people so I think it's kind of like solution and this is what we do in China we have the WeChat groups we have like 500 people in the group we can ask persons really easy and to response the people can respond quite fast like you're talking to the in the WhatsApp I don't know maybe the WhatsApp or the Facebook groups it's easier for us to communicate in the local groups so maybe we can try to summarize the questions or the needs or the requirements to the global and reflect to the global that's a very good point too you know I'm on Chinese WeChat too it's funny it's I mean people are really enthusiastic about OpenStack so sometimes we see you know if there's any analyst report about you know technology OpenStack pretty much within a few hours you see a translated version of the article on WeChat and I think that's just so helpful you know for the community to learn together and the WeChat I'm not saying you know you all should use WeChat but I find it very effective you have WeChat groups and then you know people share information in their own language that they feel comfortable with and this is a really good way to pick up new information yeah anything else our most simple solution for us is sending the energy engineer to US yeah yeah that's another solution yeah in the factor I will send the one energy to the he's becoming the PTR now yeah so that the PTR work is a very it's like the bridge thing that I was talking about right you have people who are closer to the new community who can communicate better and they become the bridge between you know the US community or the main you know stream community and your regional community yeah so from us a one-carrier pastor going to the US is a one-carrier becoming the second-hand engineer it's contributors to becoming you to stay in the US and that that can be cannot be acceptable for so all engineers are going to the US so we have to create in some some something like a so star engineer or that and then creating this engineering park and they are becoming the mentor for newcomers engineer newcomer engineers so they're consulting with us consulting with the newcomers and some advice in mentoring there is very if that is worked well the outside the US is not a very big problem right okay any other solution now we're going to move to next topic so next area that you know we need to find solution for it the next one is tool right IRC a lot of people feel it's very challenging especially sometimes people can type that fast right or on the phone and and then also I noticed that you know people use acronyms they feel comfortable with a lot of times for people who are new to the community or outside of US probably don't understand those acronyms and then they get discouraged and then they just stay silent or the most they do is plus one right so you know what would be a good solution I know the reason we stick to that tool is because it has a good recording of the communication so for people who missed the meeting or wanted to remember something they can always go back to the recording but so is any other alternative I think it's a matter of choosing the right tool for the right type of communication yeah I mean the instant messaging as you know sort of conceptually does work obviously but yeah I think it it's it really works best amongst people who already know each other yeah I know I found that communicating with people as most part of working groups over IRC is okay it's a little slow but it's okay you know once you meet someone say at the summit or something you understand a little bit more about them you you can communicate quite effectively using IRC but it's difficult coming in cold I think to to understand new people and for new people to understand sort of what's going on because they don't know all the players but having said that yeah I mean there are important requirements around around recording and around making it the communication tool available on all platforms that that sort of have driven us back to IRC yeah that topic I don't know that there's a really good solution because because you're trying to solve a number of problems at once there's language problems there's documentation documentation and and you know trying to get more done I think it's going to be very difficult with one tool does anybody have any solution if you don't like IRC is any other alternative that you like to suggest to the community are they easier to use more user friendly okay I know for some like product work groups sometimes we'll just set up conference calls you know and the challenge is who's paying for the call right so sometimes some companies that oh yeah I use my company you know bitch you guys can all die in but that you know that made it a lot easier it's nice because then you're not making like a long distance or international phone call you can also there is a us number if you want if it's just easier to dial phone number you can do that but it's also accessible via SIP and if you search for conferencing on the wiki you should get all the connection details there that's good to know okay that's really great all right thank you that was a good information all right any other solution for tools and another thing I want to bring up is in China we don't have access to google and so we can use google doc and you know and they just if we want to talk about diversity then we have to be conscientious about each region's restrictions and limitations so so just want everybody to know that and we can use facebook and no youtube either but you can use wechat actually I think slack is a good solution for the tools because actually we use the slack for the communities community you can send the pictures the irc count and we can send the pr or the issues to the to the channels to different channels and it is I think it's easier to use the slack on the on the web or on the mobile apps but it is a little bit slow in China to use it to the notification and all the loading things yeah we can try that okay all right the next area that I want to tackle is the time zone right because a lot of meetings are happening during the US more you know kind of comfortable time zone and so there's no way we can expect all the developers to die in two o'clock three o'clock in the morning especially on regular basis so what would be a good suggestion or you know alternative so I've been tackling this problem for years now I've managed people in everywhere from Brazil and Hawaii to Czech Republic and Israel and it's painful right it is painful and the only good solution I'm familiar with is to share the pain right so basically sometimes you will have to get on a call very early in the morning or very late at night but as long as you don't do it on a regular basis so you alternate between US comfortable time China comfortable time etc right so if you're conscientious of the problem and you have enough contributors from around the world then in order to keep them you have to share the pain yeah so I like to that you know that's a good insight and I always also like to share at the enterprise work group they actually do they shift the you know meeting time so every other week they meet around US favorable time and then the other time they meet around like they pack favorable time so so that's an option you know that would make people feel like they're being included they're being you know kind of considered as part of the community so if work groups or projects if they can consider that I think that would be really good and the last one since we don't have a lot of time left for one minute I'd like to address the culture issue like I guess you can't change you know people present now some people are shy and some people are more outspoken but is any other solution that you know you think that you know how we address the culture issue so people can feel more comfortable working in the open-stack community this one is really tough as well right I mean if you take a look at it's not just a cultural thing it's also if you take a look at line of store vaults comments about about women in in open-source so this is a problem that is prevalent all all over the place and many people in in open-source just say you need thick skin right personally I totally disagree with that I think what we all need to do is make sure that people focus only on the technical side not on personal comments right you don't you should avoid saying this code is stupid or even worse the author is stupid or things like that right it's just focus on the technical points make sure that people can communicate on that if and always try to assume that if something is wrong there it's either you don't understand well or they did not understand you and try to rehash the issue right it's not it's not that the other person is not smart enough it's right we need we're miscommunicating right Rowan and I think it's sort of important for anyone who's in a some form of leadership position within within a working in group at their development team or whatever to to try and draw out input from from the team members because I think as we said a few times it's it's quite common for some people not to not to want to speak up and I think an important part of being a leader even even just a technical leader with no management responsibilities it's important to get the best out of a technical team by by soliciting actively soliciting the input from from people even if it is difficult to for for some people to do that well with that I'd like to conclude since we're running out of time I think you know I think what makes Open State unique different is like we're not just about you know writing code creating technology I think this is also a community to help each other grow like we have leadership training and you know we have mentor training and that kind of stuff I think as a community you know we should learn to respect for one another be sensitive to each other's situations and this is how we can be more effective in collaborating and growing together with that thank you so much for your time and hopefully all of you will you know hopefully you found some useful tips from today's panel thank you and I'd like to thank the panelists thank you