Proposing a New "Red Hat Partners" Category for the Ansible Forum

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Hi everyone,

I’d like to propose a new category on the Ansible forum and get feedback from the community.

During the Contributor Summit session in Ghent, I shared an update about the Community and Partner Engineering team at Red Hat. As part of that I gave an overview of the Red Hat partners and how they are part of the Ansible community ecosystem.

To be clear, when we say Red Hat partners we’re specifically talking about ISV partners who create supported or certified collections. You can find the overview that we gave of Red Hat partners in the Ansible community in our forum post about Contributor Summit.

As part of the discussion we also got feedback from our contributors and community members about the lack of transparency around the certification process. It’s true that much of that information lives outside the forum, which means it is easy to miss and harder to discuss openly. We’d like to change that.

We’re proposing a new Red Hat Partners category that is dedicated to content related to the certification process and partner ecosystem. The intention is to use the category for announcements about certification requirement changes as well as technical details and guidance relevant to the certification process.

For example, announcements and other posts in the Red Hat partner category will include content such as:

  • Upgrading test coverage for Python versions to stay aligned with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform lifecycle changes.
  • Announcing and discussing new certification requirements.
  • Upcoming changes to the certification tooling, such as new Ansible Lint versions that introduce checks against new rules.
  • Highlighting common issues that partners face with the certification process and tips on how to address them.

Currently these announcements are made via email without a mechanism for reply or discussion. We saw with the core 2.19 templating changes that having discussions in the forum (such as this thread and this thread) was helpful to everyone. We were able to build up a library of resources that all collection maintainers, including Red Hat partners, found useful.

Alongside the new category, we’d also like to introduce a red-hat-partner tag. This tag will help us cross-reference and organize content relevant to partners. For example, we can use the tag to flag threads in the Collection Development category as relevant to partners.

We want to be clear that the new category proposal is not intended to replace or compete with the Collection Development category. All discussion related to collection development, best practices, tooling, CI/CD, general Q&A belongs in the Collection Development category and should stay there. The new Red Hat Partners category is specifically scoped to certification and the partner program. Partners will also be able to watch the category and get emails about updates. The tag is there to bridge the gap when there’s overlap.

The certification process affects a meaningful part of the community and it benefits everyone when the process is visible and open for participation.

Before we go ahead, we want to hear from you:

  • Does this seem like a useful addition to the forum?
  • Do you think having a separate partners category is unnecessary fragmentation?
  • Do you have concerns about the boundary between the proposed partner category and the existing Collection Development category?
  • Are there any suggestions on naming or structure?

Thanks for taking the time to read this. We look forward to the discussion.

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Are you proposing a new top level category or a sub-category like the Collection Development category?

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Great question! I was hoping we’d get into this detail because there are some important differences between top-level category and sub-category. There’s a balance we need to figure out.

We want to keep posts relevant to Red Hat partner collections distinct from community collections to avoid confusion.

For example if we want to highlight technical reasons for a new rule in the certification process, we don’t want community maintainers to get the impression that the rule applies to the Ansible community package inclusion requirements.

We also don’t want to go too far and give the impression that the forum is an “official” Red Hat support channel. The scope for using the forum for Red Hat partner communication is limited to technical concerns around collection development and maintenance.

If a partner needs help with their Red Hat account in some way, that is not appropriate or relevant to the forum. We won’t approve and will delete any such posts (while providing assistance through the “official” channels). This is a community forum, not a place to get Red Hat support. “Sir, this is a Wendys.”

We also don’t want to give the impression that Red Hat partners are “taking over the forum” or “muscling in”. I don’t know. Maybe nobody thinks that. But we don’t want to risk discouraging community participation or sending confusing signals if the Red Hat partner category was too prominent.

The goal is to bring partners closer to the community so folks can get visibility into the certification process. We also want partners to collaborate here like anyone else to participate in discussion and help each other out.

I could also create a poll to decide if A we create a partner category or not B we add a top-level category or sub-category. It’d be great to get some more discussion first and hear what people think before we put it to a vote.

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As a Debian and Ubuntu user I must admit I don’t have a view either way :wink: .

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@chris That’s a good point.

If we think about some of the recent topics that Red Hat has emailed Partners about that might help give a sense of the forum structure.