Often you can see that DevOps is about automation of tasks, measuring services and sharing information, but the right mindset/culture is also very important when it comes to practising DevOps. Are we going to focus on this aspect as well in this group? Do you think it is important in this stack?
Proposal: DevOps
Let's just take a moment to share Wikipedia definition of DevOps (emphasis is mine): "DevOps promotes a set of processes and methods for thinking about communication and collaboration – between departments of development, QA (quality assurance), and IT operations".
Some might disagree with Wikipedia's definition, but many places will have a similar definition where they say that DevOps is about processes, communications, methods, and sometimes tools and/or automation.
Therefore, I firmly believe that a DevOps stack exchange site should allow questions that evolve around all of these topics (including the promotion of these topics), not just a subset of them.
However, we must be careful to have clear guidelines that makes it clear how to write good questions to which we'll be able to write great answers. Based on the StackExchange format, it's better to have questions that can be answered rather that indefinitely discussed based on everyone's preferences.
It is totally possible to have mindset/cultural/process/guideline questions that can be answered. A question about process or methodology is not inherently vague, though it can be.
To give concrete examples, I would vote for questions like:
Such questions are likely to attract opinionated answers, so they'd be rather off-topic by the general SE guidelines.
However very clear, specific ones could be tolerated, especially given the rather wide scope of the DevOps proposal.
Take a look, for example, at the [release-management] and/or [development-process] questions on SoftwareEngineering (which IMHO should be welcomed on DevOps as well) - some of them of them could be seen as falling in the cultural category as well.
Or at questions seeking guidelines - IMHO just as subjective as those asking for cultural advice - some have very high quality, higly voted answers.
I think it'd be OK to not ban such questions with a blanket policy and instead leave it to the community members to address on a case-by-case basis, just as SoftwareEngineering does.
I can't remember where I heard it, but someone once said (wrote?) something to the effect of if your operations team is regularly having lunch with developers, you're probably already doing DevOps.
I think questions regarding culture are definitely on topic if they are practical, detailed, specific and answerable. SE sites seem to be pretty good at policing out opinion-based questions on their own. An example of a good question might be
Most of my team is ready to adopt [insert specific technology here] but a few believe it is too [insert specific objection here]. How can I help convince them?
Maybe some guidelines from http://workplace.stackexchange.com could be useful.
I think the organizational aspects of devops are just as important to discuss as the technical aspects. I frequently see places 'doing the devops' by trying to have a devops department that automates everything... but it is less common to see a place actually implementing devops culture. I think some discussions here about how to get buy-in or how to structure teams could be helpful.
Of course, at the same time we have to make sure we aren't just rehashing the same content that is written in a billion blogs about doing devops.
