It seems like just a couple of months ago that we were all gathered together at AnsibleFest London….
Oh, right. It was just a couple of months ago! And here were are, just a week away from our next AnsibleFest.
While the Fest team is busy making all the magic happen for San Francisco, we here on the Ansible community team are finalizing plans for our biggest ever Ansible Contributor Summit. It’s a good time to talk about what the Contributor Summit is, why it’s important, and how you can join us.
What is the Contributor Summit, Anyway?
Concurrent with each of the last several AnsibleFest events, we’ve had an Ansible Contributor Summit. AnsibleFest is one of the best opportunities for members of our community to gather in person, and we use these opportunities to work together in real time on problems that matter to us. It’s also a great opportunity to socialize and celebrate the results of all the work we do together.
Not everybody can attend these events in person, so we also hold them as simultaneous virtual events. We believe it’s an important commitment to the widely distributed community that makes Ansible so great.
What Do You Do at a Contributor Summit?
Our recent event in London was a great example of a successful contributor summit.
We discussed the latest happenings in the core project itself, and spent much of that time covering the ongoing Python 3 project.
We talked about the contribution model around Ansible generally. We discussed not only around code contributions, but many other possible avenues for contributor involvement. We discussed options for governance, and decided to move towards a lightweight working group model for new Ansible project teams.
We addressed the PR and issue backlog and discussed strategies for measuring and burning down backlog more effectively.
We held a testing working group session that covered a wide range of topics, including current best practices for unit testing and integration testing, and some demonstrations of new testing tools.
We then split apart into smaller teams and ran sessions for Windows and Ansible-powered CI (aka Zuul) and containers working groups.
It was a very busy day, with a full agenda – and a lot of additional topics fell off the radar because we just didn’t have time to cover them.
Who Should Come to a Contributor Summit?
We’ve got quite a few of these events under our belts now. They’ve been successful in large part because we’ve kept them small and focused on contributors in key areas.
But our community continues to grow, and its areas of interest grow as well. We now have several active working groups, with more in the pipeline.
At this point, Ansible has almost 3000 code contributors in the main repository alone – but we’re also feeling the need to expand the idea of what a “contributor” is. Who is a contributor, exactly? Someone who writes a blog post about how to use Ansible with X? Someone who hosts a meetup? Someone who has written an Ansible role for Galaxy? Someone who takes the time to file an issue?
All of these are contributors, of course. It’s a pretty good rule of thumb: if you think you’re a contributor, you’re a contributor.
Which means that if you think you should be invited to the Contributor Summit, you’re invited!
When Is It, and How Do I Attend?
To accommodate more contributors and more topics, for the first time in San Francisco, we will be moving the Ansible Contributors Summit to two days – the day before AnsibleFest (Wednesday, September 6th) and the day after (Friday, September 8th).
We’ve got a rough agenda posted here:
https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/ansible-summit-september-2017-agenda
The final agenda will continue to firm up as we get closer to the date.
If you’d like to attend in person, please sign up here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ansible-contributor-conference-san-francisco-2017-tickets-348557
Note that this is a separate event from AnsibleFest, with separate tickets for Wednesday and Friday. It’s free to sign up, but seats are limited and attendance is first-come first-serve, so please only sign up if you intend to be present.
If you can’t attend in person, but still want to participate, you are very welcome! Please see the agenda for details on how to participate remotely.
Hope to see you there!
–The Ansible Community Team