Suggestions for Community Summit

Unfortunately, some community members will not be able to attend the event. This page is for collecting suggestions, particularly focused on how to engage those not present.

Topics 

• What is the roadmap for Opscode & Chef?
• What should we do to make Chef more awesome?
• What best practices have emerged & how should we share them?
• How will our community grow while serving experts and welcoming newcomers?
• What should the Opscode Conference & other events in 2012 cover?
  • What should we call the Opscode User Conference?
• How can we make the cookbook site and cookbook community as useful and vibrant as that of rubygems?
  • This is the most important issue facing Chef.
    • The difficulty to find the latest version of an available cookbook and then figure out how its different than dozens of others buried in a repo called cookbooks strewn accross github is daunting
    • The current knife site install being stuck to the one somewhat opaque community cookbook site is stifling
    • Its really hard to make tweaks to cookbooks but still stay in sync with the source of the cookbook, let alone share the tweaks
    • The model of each organization using Chef having one git repo for all cookbooks adds to the difficulty
    • The model of an organization sharing their cookbooks on github as one big repo makes things difficult
    • Some of these difficulties are due to standard ways of doing things with git and github
      • To share via git and github you need to have a cookbook per git repo.
      • If you have dozens of cookbooks in your github account, it overwhelms the github UI
      • Its not really easy to mix and match cookbooks from various sources and still be able to follow upstream changes or push changes upstream
      • Maybe separate cookbook distribution from development (gems vs git repos)?
• Cookbook Management and Use
  • What are anti-patterns for cookbooks?
  • What are best practices for cookbooks?
  • Cookbook testing and how to automate it, esp. for opscode/cookbooks
  • What should the role of opscode/cookbooks be?
• Performance Tuning
• Security
• Building on top of chef, a la crowbar
• How to ensure the Chef server is up to date with version controlled recipes, possibly with different branches or tags for different environments, and with contributions coming from different parts of the organization?
• Professional certification for Chef, like the MCSE, RHCE. Should Chef have it? How can we make it not suck?
• How can organizations that do not use the hosted Chef contribute financially (and otherwise) to the development of Chef?
• How to make Chef-server resilient in the face of cloud providers SLA levels.
• How to manage clusters
• How to making configuration more transparent, make it easier to visualize dependencies
• Auditing/intentions of configuration changes
• Sizing and scaling a chef server/infrastructure. Redundancy, CYA, etc.
• Orchestration of multi-node systems
  • Define functionality of a cluster but render to different target clouds, physical nodes, virtual machines
    • Development, Staging, Production, etc
    • Same Orchestration description / cookbooks should be easy to render to a Vagrant Virtualbox or 10's of nodes on EC2

Event Management

• livestream the event
• Try to facilitate the participation of those not present, i.e. take questions from IRC

(Response from Jesse Robbins) The tl;dr here is that real-time remote participation in Open Space is challenging to do in a way that doesn't interfere with and dampen the dynamic and intimate flow of Open Space.

If you have never participated in an Open Space, this may sound strange. The Opscode Community Summit isn't a conference. There are no speakers, panelists, or keynotes. There is no pre-set agenda and there is no "audience". There are only fellow participants, a unique and incredible group of people gathered together in one place to work on something that matters to all of us.

There are at least two challenges to livestreaming & real-time remote participation:

1) The space we create is a safe place for people to openly discuss complex and often confidential topics without worrying that someone will share it, an idea Tim O'Reilly calls the FrieNDA. Livestream ing or recording sessions by default has the potential to change this, and in most cases just doesn't make sense to do as the facilitator. If someone decides to propose a streamed or recorded session, host a call in show, or anything else they are fully empowered to do so.

2) The technology required for people to participate in real-time and at scale, which preserves the power and intensity of a face-to-face interaction and doesn't create friction that distracts from the experience... isn't readily available. Many people find they close their laptops/ipads/etc entirely and focus on being present. If people want to host questions on IRC or other means, they are fully empowered to do so.

We will provide a wiki for participants to document sessions, issues, actions, conversations, and conclusions. While we don't know what exactly what will happen over the two days of the Summit, there are some things that are guaranteed to happen:
• The issues that are most important to people will get discussed & worked on
• The issues raised will be addressed by the participants best capable of getting something done about them.
• All of the most important ideas, recommendations, discussions, and next steps will be documented in a report which will be published to the entire community.
• Participants will be deeply engaged, connected, and energized.

Hope this helps,

-Jesse

• more wifi (I got locked out repeatedly, presumably due to the large number of simultaneous attempted connections)
• ensure each space has whiteboard space to serve as a projection view space (only spaces E & F had it)
• more sound partitioning between spaces, if possible