The Kilo Design Summit in Paris

In less than two months the OpenStack development community will gather in Paris to discuss the details of the Kilo development cycle. It starts after the keynotes on the Tuesday of the summit week, and ends at the end of the day on the Friday. We decided a number of changes in the Design Summit organization in order to make it an even more productive time for all of us.

Tuesday

On the Tuesday we'll have cross-project workshops. These are 40-min or 90-min sessions on issues that span multiple programs, and where we try to reach alignment and exploit that little window in time where all projects are in the same place. These were very successful in Atlanta, so we'll do them again. We started brainstorming potential topics on this etherpad.

On the same day there will be time for scheduled sessions for incubating projects, as well as some sessions for other OpenStack projects. I'll post details on how to participate to that on the openstack-dev mailing-list soon.

Wednesday and Thursday

On Wednesday and Thursday we'll have our usual scheduled sessions. Those are 40-min sessions on a specific theme, and they appear on the Design Summit schedule. The idea is to use those few visible time slots to gather feedback on issues that need a lot of external input, but also to address some obvious elephants in the room.

Friday

On the Friday we'll have contributors meetups. All programs will have a space for a half-day or a full-day of informal meetup with an open agenda. The idea is to use that time to get alignment between core contributors on the cycle objectives, to solve project-internal issues, or have further discussions on a specific effort. The format is very much like the mid-cycle meetups.

Program pods

Program pods are roundtables contributors can informally gather around to continue a discussion when they don't have scheduled space at the same time. In Paris we have limited space, so there will be a limited number of program pods. Incubating programs will have a designated pod, but other programs will have to share the remaining available space. Hopefully it won't be that much of a musical-chairs issue, thanks to the contributors meetup day on Friday.

Planning the summit

We decided to abandon the formal session suggestion system in favor of a more collaborative and open approach. Topics are suggested on an open document (see the list here), discussed and deduplicated at IRC team meetings, and finally split between scheduled session slots and the contributors meetup agenda. This is done under the guidance of the Kilo PTLs, which we'll be electing soon. Reminders will be posted on the openstack-dev list.

So I invite everyone to join those documents and the future team meetings discussing the summit agenda. Let's all make this Design Summit great !