oVirt initiatives

[Dave Neary]

Hi all,

With a number of colleagues and members of the oVirt community, we have 
been thinking about how we can help oVirt's adoption and increase 
developer participation and diversity in the project.

What we've come up with is a broad definition of the target audience for 
the project, and a three-phase set of initiatives we believe will help 
the project be more successful.

I'm bringing this to the board list because I would really like your 
feedback and assistance in helping make this a reality - it's important 
for me to know that we're proposing things which the project & community 
think are important.


The sample user we discussed (based on feedback from Users and the 
persona I sent previously was a cost-sensitive sysadmin, potentially 
looking to move to a KVM-based virtualisation solution, working on a 
small virtualisation set-up in a test lab environment. He loves open 
source because it means he can test and deploy it without approval, 
adoption is bottom-up, and he can tweak it to suit his needs.

We want to focus on people who want to download and try it in ~30 
minutes - running an engine and a node on the same machine (potentially 
a laptop or desktop machine) and on getting people started with small 
set-ups - perhaps two nodes and a laptop running the engine.

Given that target audience and positioning, the three phases we propose are:

Phase 1: Web presence

We want to review the website and wiki to ensure that the content is 
appropriate for our target audience, that we're making it easy to adopt 
oVirt. This will cover the top level navigation, the organisation of 
information in the website and wiki to make it easy to find, development 
of new content to focus on the beginner experience (including videos, 
tutorials, and screenshots). At the end of this, when someone from our 
core audience comes to the website it should be immediately clear to him 
that we are offering a solution to a problem he has.

We plan to start working on this through the Infra, Users and 
engine-devel mailing lists (depending on which one is most appropriate) 
immediately, and complete this work in the next 3 months.

Phase 2: Adoption

We need packages for all the main Linux distributions. Packaging oVirt 
for OSes other than Fedora is tricky because of various differences in 
config file placement, low-level tools and so on. But this must get 
done, and we'd like for it to be a priority for the project.

We also want to help the project with its promotion - both in terms of 
content on the site, and driving traffic here through conference 
outreach, articles in tech press, social media and blogs pringing people 
here via the nice to consume content (videos, tutorials, etc) which we 
would like to see produced.

In addition, we would like to ask for your help in running a set of 
oVirt meet-ups around the world, with the co-operation of board members, 
to show oVirt to the people who are interested in it, and prefer a 
high-touch approach.

This will take longer, but we expect to see some movement on this front 
in the next 6 to 9 months.

Phase 3: Expanding the target audience

While the low-end user with small virtualisation will help us drive 
adoption, we also want to help oVirt appeal to a broader audience. We'd 
like to help do a UX review of the installation and configuration 
process, and the Engine UI, to make the oVirt experience more pleasant 
for both limited-hardware users (people using all-in-one in 3.1) and for 
more sophisticated users. This is a longer term goal, of cours,e but we 
would like to see the results of this UX review in a future release of 
oVirt in ~12 to 15 months.

Looking forward to your feedback!

Thanks,
Dave.


-- 
Dave Neary
Community Action and Impact
Open Source and Standards Team, Red Hat
Phone: +33 9 50 71 55 62