AB Meeting/October 2013 Minutes

Attendees

• Jennifer Cloer (Linux Foundation/Presenter)
• Russell Pavlicek (Citrix/Presenter)
• Todd Benzies (Linux Foundation)
• Lars Kurth (Citrix/Chair)
• Mark Hinkle (Citrix/voting)
• James Bulpin (Citrix)
• Daniel Kiper (Oracle/voting)
• Will Auld (Intel/not nominated for voting before meeting)
• Matt Wilson (AWS/voting)
• Anthony Liguori (AWS)
• Ian Pratt (Bromium/voting)
• John Mao (Calxeda/voting)
• Demetrios Coulis (CA/voting)
• Harry Hart (Verizon/not nominated for voting before meeting)
• Don Slutz (Verizon)

Due to unclarity on whether Will Auld (Intel) and Harry Hart (Verizon) could vote on behalf of their organizations, we were 1 organization short of a voting quorum.

Action Updates (by e-mail, prior to meeting)

• Test Framework WG related actions : all done ✓
• PR and Messaging WG actions :
  • AMD nominate rep : Brent Hollingsworth ✓
  • Oracle nominate rep : open
  • Calxeda nominate rep : Karl Freund, VP Marketing ✓

Agenda

1. AR and PR proposal to be presented by Jennifer Cloer from the Linux Foundation. Proposal attached
2. We should probably cover the news that the Open Virtualization Alliance is now a collaborative project (I believe that this makes it more important that we support the AR/PR proposal)
3. Presentation of proposal for User Metrics by Russell
4. Discuss the two member companies, which have not yet signed the Xen Project membership agreements (these are Samsung and Verizon).

AR and PR proposal

See File:Xen Project PR Proposal 9.30.13.pdf or attached. This presentation was given by Jennifer Cloer, Director Communications, Linux Foundation

This section contains highlights and key points that were given in the presentation and questions that were sparked by it.

• Jennifer: Examples of projects that have done PR well and the impact this had
  • Openstack is has a significant PR budget, which has been driving Openstack momentum
  • In Linux, a Times article in 2005 has significantly increased momentum for Linux
  • Generally good PR drives user adoption as well as membership at project board level
    • Lars: I had a number of conversations with prospective Xen Project board members. One theme that has emerged is that articulating a future vision for the Xen Project and communicating it, is an area that is key for attracting more members to the project.
    • Lars: Another example related to user adoption is the Xen 4.3 press release (see [1]), which has led to significant interest and activity by embedded companies into
  • Jennifer: More upfront co-ordination with vendor press releases (e.g. the Verizon Cloud launch) would increase the momentum for the project as well as for members. In practice, this would mean that the PR resource that works on behalf of the project would work with PR teams from member companies and provide a project angle on relevant news. This would be beneficial for the project (demonstrating momentum) as well as for project members (increasing reach and impact)

• How would this work concretely?
  • A resource would be employed by the Linux Foundation (spending about 80 hours/month) and be dedicated to the Xen Project, reporting into Jennifer
  • A concrete example of how this would work, is that the Linux Foundation would invite press and analysts to attend interesting sessions at Xen Project Developer and User summits. This would likely lead to press coverage of what is happening in the community. In the 2013 developer summit, we had a number of talks that had big potential (e.g. any HVM guest as Dom0, Xen on Android talks, Automotive talks, Graphics virtualization talks). This would also
    • Encourage more than the existing core developer community to attend summits
    • Other activities that could be organized are round table discussions between project contributors, advisory board members, press, analysts and the Linux Foundation alongside Xen and Linux events
    • A concrete case, where the Linux Foundation had invited journalists, was at Lars’ LinuxCon NA talk, which consequently led to the following coverage
      • How Xen Virtualization got its Zen back
      • Xen and the Art of Project Management
      • Linux Luminaries paint a bright Future at LinuxCon (slide 11)
  • The resource would also help the project articulate a vision for the future of the Xen project, based on project members input. For example, Openstack had many different “voices” at the beginning, which created some confusion in the marketplace.
  • The limit of two press releases a year would not apply.
  • The resource would be responsible for: press/media wires, analyst relations, social media coverage, … it could put together a monthly newsletter and bring in new contributors to the Xen project blog.

• Discussion:
  • Can’t remember who raised this question: What other Collaborative Project make use of LF media services?
    • OpenDayLight
    • Note that this is a new service, which only recently has been offered to project members
    • Jennifer (and Lars) believe that media perception is one of the ‘’’key benefits’’’ the Advisory Board can bring to the project and community. In particular, given the image problem that the project has had in the past. Demonstrating progress, innovation and a vision for the future would provide a significant benefit for the project.
  • Mark Hinkle’s perspective:
    • Openstack is a good example of PR and buzz driving contribution and participation
    • A PR spike has also happened in CloudStack when contributed to the Apache Foundation, which increased user adoption significantly and later led to many organizations developing plug-ins and add-ins for CloudStack
    • However, Apache has no ability to do press releases and PR engagement and operates mostly on word-of-mouth. This hurts CloudStack relative to OpenStack.
    • In terms of value $100K per annum is cheap compared to using an agency, which charges $9K-$10K for 40 hours of work.
    • Mark stated that based on his experience, there is a risk that projects (such as Xen Project) can struggle to succeed relative to competitive solutions (open source or proprietary) because they do not have a voice in the marketplace.

Conclusion

• This is a significant benefit to the project as well as Advisory Board members of the project
• Open Question (was raised by Anthony in general as part of the metric discussion): this should be tied to a concrete goal such as “grow user adoption by X%” or “grow project membership by X% in 2014”, etc. as the AR/PR proposal is a means to an end, rather than a goal in itself

Next Steps

• 
   Action Lars: Send out minutes to give AB reps that have not been able to attend this meeting to understand the proposal ✓
• 
   Action Lars: Call for a vote as part of 2013 budget and project priorities
• 
   Action Jennifer: Talk to members of AB who need more information and background

OVA Discussion

At LinuxCon EU, the LF announced that the OVA joins the Linux Foundation (see [2]). We wanted to discuss/understand the impact on the project. Some key points:

• Membership fee of $30K for governing members
• 5 governing members (see http://openvirtualizationalliance.org/members/governing): HP, IBM, Intel, NetApp and RedHat
• Other members do not contribute financially to the project (just a list of names on a website). ‘’Aside: we have an eco-system directory, but have not actively promoted it so far (fixing this is one of Russell Pavlicek’s 2014 priorities)
• Anthony: there is no relationship between OVA and the KVM developer community and no input into decision making. Very user instead of developer focussed.
• There was an open question on whether the OVA will take over organization of KVM Forums. This is relevant, as we started to try to create more cross pollination between the KVM and Xen developer community in 2013 (albeit we started this too late to be really effective for Edingburgh)

• 
   Action Linux Foundation: Introduce Lars to OVA representatives (with a view of more collaboration between Xen Dev events and KVM forums)

Proposal for User Metrics by Russell

See File:Xen Metrics for LF 10.22.13.pdf or attached. This presentation was given by Russell Pavlicek, Xen Project Evangelist, Citrix

• Russell’s proposal covers how to measure the “wellness of the project”
• The proposal contains a list of metrics to be compiled monthly and reported quarterly
• Mark Hinkle: would be willing to fund the creation (and subscription fee for 6 months) of a dashboard for the project similar to openstack dashboard. We had engaged with a company which creates and hosts dashboards called bitergia and established that a dashboard for the Xen project is doable in principle.
  • Anthony (Amazon) raised the very valid point that metrics should be tied to concrete growth objectives for the project (e.g. “grow the number of patches submitted weekly by X%”, “grow the number of contributors by Y%”, …). This looks feasible for developer focussed metrics and would cost in the order of $100-$300 per month subscription fee
    • Lars: agrees that this is a good idea and would help with focus
    • Lars: besides measuring success (which ought to be tied to concrete objectives), the dashboard can help identify community problems via changes to mailing list usage patterns, etc. A concrete example of what can be measured is code review process vs. actual commits (could be easily covered by a dashboard but is extremely hard to do manually)

• 
   Action Lars: Continue to engage with bitergia for a concrete proposal ✓
• 
   Action Lars: We should agree concrete measurable goals for the different project focus areas in 2014 (see 2013 focus areas). Refine goals with measurable objectives for 2014.

Missing Paperwork

Two member companies have not yet completed all paperwork for the project.

• 
   Action Harry from Verizon: Raise with Kevin Clarke to close ✓
• 
   Action Lars: Raise with Samsung and Linux Foundation ✓