text:
Should WinOps be a tag?
Per Wikipedia:

WinOps (a portmanteau of "Windows" and "DevOps") is a term used
  referring to the cultural movement of DevOps practices for a
  Microsoft-centric view. It emphasizes the use of the cloud,
  automation and integrating development and IT operations into one
  fluid method on the Windows platform.

Should this be a predefined tag to encourage and grant visibility of DevOps on Windows specific questions?

I'm unsure it is needed, I feel question when scoped enough will include a azure/windows tag, so I don't feel its necessary to have a "meta" tag for it.

That's true, "Windows" itself might be more obvious/explicit.

As this is already a devops-related site, having a tag named windows should specifically mean the same thing as Winops (acc to the definition in your question).
Also, it would be more easy (and less confusing) [Just my opinion, though] for new users and existing users to look up and understand, than winops.


text:
How to properly ask questions with geographical limitations?
How do you ask question about resources that could have a geographical limitations? For example questions on Conferences, Seminars, University programs, etc.
Questions like that can either be viewed as too broad, because they would have many different answers for each region or they could be viewed as too narrow and excluding part of the community if restricted to a specific region. Do we simply avoid all such questions, unless the resources are available online?
Would this mean we need to exclude a large part of this subtopic?

I indeed do think they are not a good fit for this kind of site. (not an answer  at all to how to ask them, so just a comment to voice the position)

There is a concept in databases called partitioning, when a data set is too large, it can be partitioned along ranges on a specific index. Is it really not possible in any way to partition a question with some geographic specificity into a set of questions that would each be relevant and together form a complete picture?

The problem is agreeing on what is a reasonable scope geographically I think to avoid getting a question for each town over 50k inhabitants. This can be tested when we will have more people able to moderate answers to get rid of spam for each existing conference/learning site, etc

There may be some cases where geographically-constrained questions make sense. For example if you have to follow certain rules or laws that only apply to a particular country/region. I can't think of a good example right now for DevOps, but we have a several of those questions on Sustainability SE for example (which is also why that site has country tags).
However asking for resources is often off-topic (see my answer to the meta question: What is our take on list-style community-wiki questions?)

Here's an example: GDPR-related questions, IMHO with some devops-related implications

I don't think they'd be a good fit in SE.
Why?
Cause, if they get on-topic, how do we define a Geographical boundary?  Will it be a continent, specific area, country, city, or a place?
So, it's difficult, and often confusing come to a consensus with.
However, questions with an overall view, and to-the-point are on-topic.
Like for example: What are the annual container-tech related conferences?, etc.

The examples you gave for Geography based questions are also very limited in terms of Time.
Conferences, Seminars, University programs, etc, all change from Year to year and can exist for a very short amount of time.
On the other hand, people often travel across the globe to attend a specific University or Conferences, so I don't really think the question is limited to a specific geography.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


text:
How can we encourage Constructive Criticism?
How can we encourage users to use Constructive Criticism? It seems that some of the users, encouraged or excused by the StackExchange rules are primarily focused on Destructive Criticism, which concentrates on saving resources and preserving purity of purpose.
How can we encourage the use of Constructive Criticism, what are the StackExchange rules in support of it, ie. what would be the argument for it?
How can we persuade users that are very quick to reach to Destructive Criticism to instead take a "wait and see" approach and give first a chance to someone to use Constructive Criticism as means of improving Questions and Answers on this site?

I found leading by example, the best way to go ahead with this.
Initially, users were very prompt at downvoting and closing off questions very fast, without a comment in DataScience SE too, which is very bad for a new site(It was, then.), cause it again takes the same number of reopen votes for reopening the question, after the OP has figured out what's wrong in their question and did the necessary edits.
So, an alternate approach is, first leave a friendly comment, like:
Welcome to <> SE. This question would most likely be closed cause < mention the reason properly and clearly >, and give the OP some time for revisiting the post, and properly edit it.
If the OP still doesn't edit/improve the post to fit into the community's policies, then by all means, go ahead and close it off.
Having said that, posts which are blatantly off-topic or which looks like copy-pasted homework or which displays significant lack of effort(like, basic error googling, etc), should be closed down.
However, don't expect all the users to be as constructive as you are.  It will take time for them to see how good constructive criticism is, and how it is, thereby improving the site as a whole.
PS: Some OP's who were given time to improve their first posts, are now regular users in DataScience SE, and are giving the same welcoming and moderation treatment to their fellow users now. And a site which was supposed to be dead long back, is now close to graduation :).
So, the culture will catch up, but it has to start with a person or two.

I assume you put under Destructive Criticism every down vote or vote to close action.
Indeed being accustomed to Stack Exchange (SE) rules applying to mostly every site include a bias, which Shog9 did nicely resumes in his comment here:

You can't leave your memories at the door even if you wanted to,
  @Stijn. Instead, try to remember why we do things the way we do them
  elsewhere... And if you don't know, find out before you blindly repeat
  the rituals here.

The reasons to downvote a post are in the hovering tooltip:

"This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not
  useful"

They are pretty subjective and everyone is free to act on his/her personal feeling toward a post. Commenting to let the author know the concern is not mandatory, I do think it is constructive.
Next voting to close a question is actually an indication at least 5 users think there's a problem with this question.
For too broad, which I assume is your main concern, that's because those users think it won't have a useful outcome.
Either because answering the question can't fit in the format of the site and would be better addressed in a blog post, or because it is not scoped enough and answers will start to pile until finding the gem answer within all will just hide it; Example here of something where after a while it's absolutely unpractical.
You may dislike it, but closing a question is already a constructive thing, enforcing the asker to search why the community think its question is not a good fit for the site.
Goal of SE sites is to build a knowledge base which should not fade off with time whereas possible. Questions asking for list of things are likely not give anything useful on long term, but Robert Cartaino explain it better than me in the first part of his answer here.

Stack Exchange works really well when you ask very specific questions
  about a problem you encountered in your day to day work — something
  that can be at least somewhat definitively answered as rankably "most
  correct."

So to get back to your exact question:
Leaving a comment explaining the reasons of a down vote or a close vote, specially at this time of 20 days old site, is a constructive behavior in my opinion as it helps discussing the concerns. That indeed save energy, as if the author doesn't like your opinion and don't review its question you won't have to get back periodically to check and finally cast your vote if nothing changed. Moreover when you comment the author can ping you after reviewing its post with @nickname to let you know a change has been made.
This had already happened, with the help of a meta question for guidance here

Actually that is incorrect assumption. Down vote or vote to close can be a constructive criticism in aggregate. It can also be destructive criticism when applied too early and without comment. It depends on context. A question that stays at 0 reputation for a week being down-voted and/or voted to close is a clear message. A question down-voted once in first hour after it was asked and then staying at -1 reputation is an attempt to sway opinion and can be destructive on borderline questions and constructive on spam for example. Context is important.

As you didn't give any example of what you think is destructive, it's hard to  answer on a specific topic. But yes, this may impact opinion, as a question updated an then gathering up votes will impact opinion also. You give me the feeling you do not trust people to make their self opinion at all, that's sad in my point of view.

People generally follow influencers. If I was that kind of person, I could demonstrate for you that with a quick down-vote and articulate negative comment I can kill any question on the site, no matter how good it is.

Maybe link to an actual example of when this did happen, here or elsewhere on a SE site ?

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text:
Is 'Develoment support' excluded from DevOps?
The Area 51 question at "On why having a DevOps q&a website would be useful for many" is, IMO, the reason-d'être (reason to exist) for DevOps.SE. Especially this passage in it is so true:

... war between SOers doing sysadmin and SFers writing code

It also includes some details about these DevOps related areas:

development support
continuous integration
continuous deployment
monitoring

Comparing these areas to what is currently used as the DevOps baseline (or "mission", or whatever you want to call it):

Beta Q&A site for software Engineers working on automated testing, continuous delivery, service integration and monitoring, and building SDLC infrastructure.

My question: what happened to "develoment support"? Did that get removed somehow, or is this something to be considered as part of "building SDLC"?

Yes, Sdlc is software development life cycle, so it include naturally support. That said, being less obscure on sdlc sounds a necessary improvement

In my opinion the Development Support is a big part of what this site should be about. But this is falling victim to the general notion of the early moderators frowning on process and culture questions that do not have specific technical answers. Restricting Development Support just to building SDLC is narrowing it to the strictly technical part of the problem, which will be counter productive. No technical solution can succeed without a cultural and process change. Unless we discuss the non-technical aspects of these issues, we are not just making this site less useful. We are specifically making it NOT DevOps.
The overly strict application of the SE rules is being used to justify this attitude and we need to find a way how to get around this mental limitation or this site will run into this issue at every level.
DevOps is a strange beast in a way as it is a mix of both Social and Natural science. There is a large tendency to limit the scope to simply just Natural Science. It is hard for a scientist to be both and if you judge a Social Sciences question through the lenses of Natural Science, it will often seem as too broad, off topic or opinion based. We deal with the social issues of the Software Development and need to be able to answer the questions from both technical and social aspect.

Counter examples of your point How can I persuade developers on my team to embrace “You build it, you run it”?, What processes or tools enable Segregation of Duties when engineers both deploy and run code?, both well received without being absolutely technical.

Finding 2 questions out of 200 does seem to be like finding the exception that confirms the rule rather than a counter example. But I hope to be proven wrong. here.

I think this answer somehow confirms my perception, i.e. I find it strange/bizarre to consider "Development support" as part of "building SDLC". Maybe @Tensibai should transform his (!) comment here (and also the one below my question) into an additional answer? Maybe Jiri should add a few sample questions to further elaborate on what he wrote in this answer?

Well, that's just 2 in the 15 most active, comments are limited in size, I won't list every question just to make the point.

BTW, I agree with the on-topic and non technical question part. But the overall tone and accusations sounds more a rant toward people disagreeing with you more than a factual observation.

Actually I've been sufficiently discouraged from contributing that I don't even have examples of people disagreeing with me on this topic. I am waiting for the public beta to see if the mood changes. I've also seen much reduced contribution from Evgeny, probably for similar reasons. But I am encouraged by some postings of Liath and Richard Slater. Time will tell.

@Jiri I'm sad to hear that, but I'm convinced part of your discouragement is due to the fact you think people are against some topics where they are against open ended questions whatever the topic is. That's a common misconception about close votes, I regret I have failed to explain this better despite our long talks.

I'm still open to discuss it on fresh ground if you wish.

and building SDLC infrastructure

Building a Software Development Life Cycle infrastructure implies a cross support from ops to dev and from dev to ops.
So I'd argue it is on-topic for the site.
It is true the site description sounds too much technically oriented only, the definition phase of the proposal was not so oriented.
Maybe something like (not really good IMHO):

Q&A site for about automated testing, continuous delivery, service
  integration and monitoring, SDLC infrastructure and cross team
  support.


text:
How do meta discussions lead to decisions?
Meta questions tagged with discussion, is an interesting tool to have .... discussions!
But, similar to real world discussions, they should lead to some conclusion/decision. Be it by going for the answer with the highest number of voting balance, or via whatever other criteria you may want to pick.
However, how can "I" (say in X months from now), find out what the ultimate decision was (or if there is one already or not) about any meta question tagged as discussion?
Somehow related: I doubt that just using "the accepted answer" is a valid answer to my question ... Think about what kind of situations that could lead to for anything "you" would want to be decided about: (1) ask a question (2) wait for any answer that "you" like best and mark that as accepted (3) if no answer fits what you like, just post your own answer and mark that as accepted ... That can't be right, right?
BTW, I'd also love to see 1 such existing meta question, where I can see what the decision was.

Related: How is consensus determined on Meta sites?

@Aurora0001 indeed related, merci (+ also for the typo corrections). Would you agree that an answer like so is what could be the solution: (1) Post 1 answer with 1 possible answer/solution to the topic of the discussion and (2) have anybody vote up/down to express agree/disagree and (3) consider the voting balance of each answer as an indication of what the concensus (instead of the decision) is and (4)be aware that it is not always the consensus that gets implemented by those who have the authority about the ultimate decision PS: not sure if I should rework this comment to my own answer.

If the position in the question is agreed, no answer could be a valid option too, and the post vote support it. This avoid self answering yourself on meta

@Tensibai good point, have to remember that also ... So something like "Correct me if I'm wrong (by posting an alternative solution via your own answer), but I think so and so".

Nice question!
So, in my experience with StackExchange, this is how I think the discussion questions trigger a change:

Question is asked
If it's straight-forward, then a direct answer can sometimes suffice.
If not, then the community needs to decide on the answer. So, this triggers a series of events, which means a lot of comments underneath the answers(which are mostly opinions from experienced folks, and also the suggestions from new folks).
Chat is a crucial part of this. There will be a chat discussion in the chatroom regarding the question, if it is something which is crucial for the future of the site.
And, after a detailed discussion of the community, a consensus is reached, and the better answers keep coming up, which will be voted, and finally the OP accepts the answer which he/she thinks is backed by the better part of the community.

So, it's not like, once you ask a question, a couple of folks answer it and you accept one of them. They're an entire process in themselves. :)
^ Also, one reason why discussion posts don't get accepted so early.
PS: An example of such post, from my experience.


text:
How to handle questions where the answers may depend on the platform (OS)?
Consider the various answers to these questions I asked already:

How to implement a frozen test environment?
How to avoid continuous integration-caused instabilities in test environments?

Interestingly enough, part of the answers to each of these questions somehow indicate something like "If you're trying to do this on a platform (OS) like a mainframe, or an AS400, then the answer is so and so".
So far I intentionally tried to avoid adding any indications/restrictions in my questions with (eg) something like so:

I'm familiar with how this is done in (eg) a mainframe, but I wonder about the distributed world.

My questions:

How to handle questions where the answers may depend on the platform (OS), should I try to already indicate the platform for which I'd like to be the answers about? Or should I rather leave that open, so that where needed in the answers an indication about the platform is included?
What kind of tags might be relevant (such as mainframe-alternatives)?
Imagine a question doesn't include such indication, with answers like "if I would be asked this question in a mainframe environment, then this is what my answer would be", is that to be encouraged, or rather discouraged?

Possible duplicate of How can I improve a question about comparing technical solutions?

To extend on the duplicate, I feel the answer there about practical question is absolutely applicable for this question also

Personally, if I am knowledgeable in multiple ways to solve a problem, I will attempt to articulate them all, depending on the depths I need to go into for each answer this might be to multiple questions.
Equally, if someone has responded to the question for Product X and I can answer it for Product Y then I will add answer for Product Y. Sometimes the OP comes back to you and says it was the other guy who solved the problem, occasionally they don't, and you have a one vote answer hanging around, might solve someone's problem one day, though.
Finally, an approach to answering questions which focus on the strategies used to solve the problem is a valuable education tool as a strategy is an enduring answer that can be applied across many problem domains and technical stacks - it is always worth providing concrete examples on how this can be technically achieved to support your strategy.

OK, makes sense, which is somehow similar to some of my answers. I.e. for cases where the question does not specify which (eg) patform or product it is about. In those cases, more and more I include in my answers some assumptions (eg: if I was to do this in a mainframe environment, then so and so). The risk with this kind of answer is that you get a comment from OPer like "your assumption is wrong", however that doesn't invalidate my answer anymore to the version of the question as it existed when I posted my answer.

If someone says my assumption is wrong that is fine it gives me an chance to revisit my assumptions, that can never be a bad thing.  I have deleted many, many answers on SO because my answer has caused the author to change the question - I'm totally comfortable with that.

yes but, there is a dowsite to it also ... sometimes I post answers on a site with custom code, taylored to a question, and then OPer may say "thank you, but I cannot use it because of another version or so ... (not mentioned in theO)".

@Pierre.Vriens That's the exact reason to close a question as unclear or too broad, to avoid getting answers unvalidated by a change to the question done after an answer which made the OP realize there's an important point missing. The best idea is to ask for precision in comments.

While DevOps implements Lean philosophy, what we aim to do is to deliver customer value (faster and better).
If you are an engineer, and decisions for the platform are already made (sometimes, not by yourself), you can't do much about taking a strategic decision.
This puts an assertion on things which have to work fast in current context.
Still, some time the daily business context might change, so it's important also to know the methodology and not just a quick fix. Also, for a quick fix it's important to understand the risks and know about alternatives.
DevOps is daily applied scientific method, and learning and communication for these purposes should be fun on both sides!
Therefore I'd say best is if you see such question:

Generally, step back from the doing to the rationale. Highlight the "why" before the "how".
Put the problem into context using professional platform-neutral terms and capitalize on DevOps approaches and methods relevant in this context. This puts you also in sync with the question poster and educates him/her what they are actually doing, sometimes they might be not aware (add well possible misenterpretation on our side and get messy communication in worst case)
Then, if you know the solution in the platform context, provide also an insight why it follows from the approach/method. It is also good not to explain everything into last detail but maybe give hints for further research/troubleshooting.
Talking about alternatives, assert the importance of talking to the customer/stakeholder in terms to understand the requirements and risk assessment.
Demonstrate your practitioner experience and give examples from your experience in terms of your NDA allows, come on, all or most of us work with open source components, so there will be enough examples. Share relevant resources you've recently read.

Examples how I've tried my best along these lines in two recent answers (admittedly in two of these three cases the topic was to make a decision and in the third one there was a possible choice between products of same vendor):

Explain that (also light-weight) due diligence and vendor selection might be risky if customer reduces this choice just to the lowest price factor or delegates responsibility for such decisions to the engineer.
Give pragmatic reasoning on and disenchant a little bit the "magic" of deployment and configuration automation tools from computer science perspective.
Put required cloud solution in common production context.

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text:
Could someone create a `docker-compose` tag?
The question at "Why is one not allowed to use a Boolean in a docker-compose.yml?" is about docker-compose but there is not such a tag.

You can do it yourself—simply type docker-compose into the tag entry box, and it will be created.
In private beta, creating tags only requires 1 reputation point. When we leave private beta and the privilege levels increase, it should be sufficient to leave a little notice at the end of the post asking for the tag to be added (or perhaps leave a comment).
In public beta, 150 reputation will be required, and after graduation, 300 rep is required (see Reputation requirements compared on Meta.SE).

Oh normally at least 300 rep is required right?

@030: Yes, it will be 150 reputation in public beta, and 300 past graduation.


text:
What is our take on list-style community-wiki questions?
I have asked a question about devops conferences around the world. And it has been closed as a list question, whereas it has been a helpful post in both CrossValidated and DataScience.
As it would be converted to a community-wiki, I don't see the problem with it being a list question.
A user also mentioned that this would be too long for a list question, but I don't see the down side of it. What is wrong if the list of answers is too long, if it's helping the users.  Also, when the users can flag and vote on answers, I don't think it'll be difficult to maintain such community wikis, esp Devops is turning out to being an active private beta.

The Community Wiki feature has been largely deprecated and has already  been removed from the 'Ask Question' page. Even as a special setting, Community Wiki should not be used to forgive questions that otherwise would not be allowed.

@RobertCartaino My reasoning behind the CW question was to have a one post only everyone could edit to keep it up to date. But for this specific case, it may not fit within the post limit anyway.

@Tensibai That particular use case for Community Wiki was replaced by the 'suggested edit'.

Quoting a relevant answer from SE community moderator Robert Cartaino on a similar question on a different SE site:

The problem with most of these "let's create a list" questions is that it becomes really hard to begrudge anyone their entry. Voting on a favorite book/tool/application/website/blog/etc is based on popularity and what you know, and all semblance of expertise is lost. These questions are fine for a roundtable discussion forum; but for a Q&A site, we generally suggest forgoing them completely.
I can appreciate the desire to ask these "getting started primers" — It's just easier to cast a broad net and pick through the random answers to see what suits your particular interests later. But this site will work better if you help users flesh out a question about what specific problem they are encountering and what they are having trouble understanding in their day to day work. Specific, long-tailed questions will work much better than "you guys talk and I'll pick out the good stuff later."

This being said, I do think there is a use for (community-wiki) list-questions, but only if such a question:

is focused on a particular problem
has an answer with a limited number of entries (say less than 25)
the answers aren't changing / outdated quickly

Your example question fails on all 3 points.

Fully agree with this position, and  7ochem's comment give a very good reason to keep it closed finally.


text:
Accepting Nominations — Who should moderate this site?
Ideally Moderators are elected by the community, but until the community is large enough to hold a proper election, we will be appointing three provisional Moderators to fill those roles.
We need your help. Please nominate folks you would like to see become provisional moderators for this site. Your input will provide valuable insight to help us make our selections. You can read more about the process here: Moderators Pro Tempore.
The Nomination Process:

Nominate a user by posting an 'answer' below. Each nomination should be a separate answer. Use the template at the bottom of this post to complete your nomination.
Self nominations are encouraged. This is a volunteer activity, so users should not feel obligated to accept these positions. A self-nomination is simply a way to say, "I am very much interested in this, so let my record speak for itself."
Tell us about the candidates. Nominations can include links to other activities like Area 51 participation, participation in other sites, or any relevant thoughts/links that may help us make an informed decision.
Nominees! Please indicate your acceptance by editing the answer to accept/decline the nomination. And please ensure your profile email is correct so we can contact you. Optionally, you are encouraged to write a bit about yourself following your acceptance.

I accept/decline this nomination.
Hi, I am name/location/fun fact (all optional). I live in <location>, so I am generally active on this site from <time> to <time>. Some other things you may want to know about me are…

Here is what we'll be looking for in a Moderator candidate:
We are looking for members who are deeply engaged in the community's development; members who:

Have been consistently active during the earliest weeks of this site's creation
Show an interest in their meta's community-building activities
Lead by example, showing patience and respect for their fellow community members in everything they write
Exhibit those intangible traits discussed in A Theory of Moderation

Nomination Template
To nominate a candidate, copy and paste the text below as an answer and complete your nomination writeup:

  ###Notes:
  This nominee would be a good choice because …

Robert, the certificate of meta is reported invalid: https://meta.devops.stackexchange.com/users

Yeah, @RomeoNinov, that's broken for all HTTPS links on all meta sites and has been forever and will be until we finish this: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/292058/network-wide-https-its-time

I nominate Tensibai for Moderator Pro Tempore. Tensibai has been quite active here since the start, both on the main site (with 27 answers and 2 questions) and in meta (12 answers and 2 questions). Furthermore he is an experienced user on StackOverflow where he has a reputation of 11K+

I accept this nomination.
So I'm Tensibai, I live in France and I'm checking the site between 9 A.M. and 6 P.M. (GMT+1 or 2) during weekdays usually.
I hope my actions on main site, meta and chat show I feel concerned by this site and that I'm open to discussion. Feel free to browse my network profile to have a wider idea about me and I'll answer any questions in comments if there's some.

Wow, thanks, really, I'm glad to be nominated by someone.... let me till tomorrow to make my mind about it, too late to take a decision like this right now.

Sure, no problem. I think it will be at least a few days before the SE staff will appoint the moderators.

Yes I'm sure we have plenty of time, but it's nearly 10pm here and the day was exhausting, my first reaction has been to start with editing for a ok, but I think I'd better take a night over it to be sure I can handle the responsibility on midterm with a fresh mind :)

You have as much time as you need to find a way to rationalize editing "accept" into this answer, @Tensibai.

I have nothing to do with DevOps but I know Tens for a few years now (from SO - where we are trying to moderate some tags together using a chat room) and I must say he is very level headed, professional, rational, always ready to help- in short I think he will be a great mod.

Notes:
I think I would be a good choice because I have experience with maintaining, and help maintain several sites. This also includes several private beta SE-sites (where I have also fulfilled my commitment from Area51), such as:

Artificial Intelligence.
Ethereum.
HardwareRecommendations.

Also, I have actively contributed in maintaining and help maintain sites like DataScience, WorkPlace, CrossValidated and Startups SE and have several moderation badges to prove the same.
Here is a link to my site-wide activity on StackExchange.
I can commit to moderating across the Asia (Mumbai) IST timezone.

@Pierre.Vriens Added links to my profiles in all the sites.  But, by all means, please go ahead and make any edits if you think they'll be constructive. :)

Please review my edit of your answer (I didn't change the actual content, of course, only adapted the formatting a bit). If you don't like it at all, just perform a rollback. Good luck!

@Pierre.Vriens Perfect. It looks better.  Thank you :)

About

He often helps improving questions/answers on drupal.SE, via actions such as:

Add comments to clarify questions.
Edit question tags to correct the tagging.
Edit posts to fix typos/grammar, or to add relevant links, or to help improve answers.
Create/edit tag wikis and/or wiki excerpts.

He already contributed quite a lot to this (private beta) DevOps site, and related meta-site ... Just check the stats about Editors, Voters, Reputation and Review queues.
He is the top reviewer in each and every review queue at Drupal.SE.
His availability seems to be virtually unlimited (close to 7d/7d and 24h/24h, all year around).

Area of expertise

He has lots of DevOps expertise, for topics such as scm, configuration, etc ... read more.
"How to use the Features module in a 3 dev environment?" applies his DevOps to Drupal.

Time for a walk
His passion, apart from SCM and gardening, seems to be a special breeds of dogs. These passions are reflected also in his profile pictures (which occasionally change).
And if he ever posts a comment like "Time for a walk (with my profile picture)!", then be ready for some illuminating answers (or interesting questions) that may follow soon.
Recommendation
For all reasons mentioned above, I think this nominee would be a great choice ...
Trust me ... and use this public beta period for testing it yourself.

I, Pierre.Vriens, accept this nomination.
I am from the land of Beer, Chocolats, Fries and ... where the DevOps-term appears to have been introduced first (so I was told ...). I got involved with mainframe SCM about a decade before Y2K became a thing. Who remembers the DevOps challenges from around then?
It's hard to tell when I am generally NOT active on me favorite SE-sites (DevOps.SE is one of them). Refer to my (1st) comment to this answer to get an idea about how I think about things like voting or answering.
I've never been a mod on any SE-site, so consider me at your own risk. May the stats posted by @Adrian, and the metrics that @Tensibai mentioned in a comment here, help you to do your own research about this risk.
Note: I wonder (not worry ...) about the reasons for the anonymous downvotes (for ALL candidates). But, similar to handling support calls: if we don't understand the problem, we cannot (try to) fix it. So after yet another walk with my profile picture, I've decided to just ignore those votes.

Update: This is how the Candidate score looked like as of April 2, 2017:

User Link    Total CappedRep BadgeCount ModBadges EditingBadges ParticipationBadges

Pierre.Vriens   10         1          9         2             4                   3
Tensibai         8         2          6         0             3                   3
Dan Cornilescu   6         1          5         0             2                   3
Dawny33          4         0          4         0             2                   2
Dave Swersky     2         1          1         0             0                   1
Romeo Ninov      1         0          1         0             0                   1

Beat on time, was collecting some interesting metrics on Pierre but seems you know him better than me ;)

I see two downvotes in this nominations but I can't see the reasons in the comments. If we want to improve the community we need to says what is wrong or what should be improved.

@Tensibai Feel free to edit the nominations with your point of view.

I don't get it either, but I see not much to add

Merci for your post Adrian! I may not be as good as you wrote, but I do like exchanging knowledge using SE sites. And possibly help other users with their problems. Also, IMO it's so easy to vote-to-close (or downvote) a question (or answer), but it's way more difficult to challenge/motivate a user to try to improve their post (at the risk they don't like or get it). And I consider questions that I answer as a way to *continuously test" (oeps!) my own knowledge.". PS:  Time for a walk ..., eg to think about @Tensibai 's comments (like about those metrics).

@Pierre metrics are those showing an interest in moderation, flag raised, percent deemed helpful, vote behavior, meta posts and their tone. Just things showcasing the interest on moderation and about quality of posts

I didn't downvote Pierre's nomination, but I did downvote 1 or 2 of his rather broad early questions which he immediately answered himself. I know self-answering is allowed on SE sites, but I think it should be limited to posting solutions to practical problems you encountered. I can imagine the self-answering turned off other people as well.

@Pierre.Vriens has been one of the most helpful folks on this site. Helped me with a lot of excellent answers and also formatting.  (+1)

@THelper DankJeWel (oeps: thank you) for your constructive comment also. You seem to confirm what I was hesitating about myself also, and I'm still trying to find a good balance, or to hear from others which part/kind of my expertise might help to improve the site content. The toughest part, IMO, it to write the appropriate question. So consider it as my attempts to do some private beta experiments, to see what works, and what not. But the only way to find out (and help "me"), is to leave comments when downvoting. Snappie (aka "Get it")? PS to Dan: still want to know my bank-down-story?

@Pierre.Vriens Experimenting is fine, but in my opinion it's best to do this in a more mature site, not now in private beta. At this stage we need good example questions and answers to show people the kind of posts we want and value. You're right that I should have communicated this sooner.

I support @Pierre.Vriens nomination for moderator. Have been seeing his great works on Drupal.SE. (+1)

Hi, I'm Dan, I live in Canada and I'm a Continuous Integration nut.
I'd be honoured to be a Moderator Pro Tempore until proper elections can take place. I closely followed the most recent 2 incarnations of the proposal and I'd like to help make DevOps one of the most popular StackExchange (SE) sites.
My schedule is flexible, I'm often online between 9am - 3pm and 10pm - midnight EST on weekdays and randomly during weekends, so I can get a pretty good coverage of the Americas' activity.
Ex hardware designer, ex embedded software developer. Work experience on both dev and ops. I'd call myself a devops guy, if such role would actually exist ;)
The bulk of my SE reputation comes from Google App Engine related posts on StackOverflow. My curating SE activities so far have been solely from a regular user position, I didn't yet use the moderator tools (other than the shortcut for tags edits). So there will be a bit of a learning curve for me.

Notes:
I'd like to volunteer for Moderator Pro Tem of the DevOps StackExchange site.  I'm active on the site every day.  I'm in the American Central time zone.
I've been working intensively in DevOps and Agile for three years.  I've presented on DevOps at conferences including the DevOps Enterprise Summit in 2014. I have been a StackOverflow user since the beta in 2008.  I am also writing a book about DevOps tools:
http://devopskatas.com
Most of my experience in moderation comes from answering/asking on StackOverflow for the last eight years. I'm active on SO in closing questions that can't be answered, commenting on questions that can be "saved" with a little more clarification, and spot-editing questions that need a little spelling/grammatical help.
Thank you for your consideration!

Hi Dave! Thank you for stepping forward. I see you are quite active on Stack Overflow, but can you tell us a bit about your moderation/site maintenance experience?

Most of my experience in moderation comes from answering/asking on StackOverflow for the last eight years.  I'm active on SO in closing questions that can't be answered, commenting on questions that can be "saved" with a little more clarification, and spot-editing questions that need a little spelling/grammatical help.

Notes:
This nominee would be a good choice because I have wide areas of knowledge and count myself as wise person.
My areas of interest and participation in SE sites include:

Unix & Linux where I have reputation >1600. On this site I also
participate in review ( by reputation >1000) with First Posts review
= 272, Late answers = 55
superuser where I have reputation >1100. On this site I also
participate in review (by reputation >1000) with First Posts review
= 1962, Late answers = 417
Information Security where I have reputation >500. On this site I also
participate in review (by reputation >500) of First Posts and Late answers
DevOps I also participate in review (by reputation >200) with Close Votes = 23, Reopen Votes = 19

I have in my answers 1, 2, 3 with upvotes more than 10 (in Unix and Security)
My timezones are: CET (GMT+1) and EET (GMT+2) (50/50)
P.S. Just for the record I also participate in Photography where my reputation is 1274 with First Posts review = 1086, Late answers = 349
P.P.S. I am Global Moderator in one local forum with >200k users and (almost) 3M posts. My duties include approve, delete, edit posts, move, combine, split articles and so on

Does your knowledge include site moderation? And what experience do you have with site maintenance activities on this or other SE sites?

@THelper, yes, I have good experience of moderation (not on SE site(s), but for more than 6-7 years). No, I do not have experience with site maintenance on SE site(s)

Hey Romeo, I think you should try to improve/expand your own answer. Why not also explain a bit about your contributions in "Unix & Linux", and/or Super User? Or add some details about that moderation on none-SE sites. If it would help you, why not "steal" whatever fits from any other answer, and tweak it to fit for you. Also, I think it could be appropriate also to remind others about your ranking in the review queues that you have gained access to so far. Extra question: what about tag edit suggestions (if any?). Ping me if you want/need help or feedback. Try it!


text:
Can I ask a question about debugging problems in common DevOps tools?
I'm running into a problem while running Docker for Windows, where it's unresponsive after restarting the MobyLinuxVM in Hyper-V. Would that be on topic here, or should I ask elsewhere?
An argument in favour of asking here would be that there are likely experts on Docker for Windows around, while an argument in favour of asking elsewhere would be that it's just not what this Stack was meant for. As noted in "Defining site on-topic scope in help center?", the scope isn't defined yet in the help.

I went ahead and asked it:
https://devops.stackexchange.com/q/507/187
We'll see how it's received.

I don't see why it will be off-topic on this site.
Docker is well on-topic here, and is also a major Devops-related technology out there.  (Psst, we already have 12 Docker-related posts and 9 container related ones)
So, this question is perfectly on-topic here.  Also, welcome to the site :)

Thanks. I went ahead and asked it, then thought it to be a problem with Hyper-V rather then Docker. I'm still not sure if debugging problems in common DevOps tools should be on topic or not. But thanks for the welcome.

@SQB Yeah.  But, it's (the scope) best decided by the community.  We did that at DataScience, and community decided against such questions.  But here, it's too early to say. So, we need to wait until it is clear :)


text:
Are DevOps related questions about Software Escrow on-topic (or not)?
Software Escrow (SE) is about getting a 3rd party involved, trusted by 2 parties, where pieces of software components (Artefacts?) get deposited, with al sorts of "strings attached".
If you know a bit about SCM (Software Change Management), then you'll understand (as I like to explain it) it's a special kind of SCM. But because of its nature, all sorts of extra challenges show up. Think of a legal person, such as a lawyer, acting as a release manager (not knnowing at all what the software application is supposed to do) ... fun garanteed!
So is SE on-topic or not?

As for any pay only software, with some luck someone with enough expertise may be able to answer your question.
As long as the question describe a real problem with enough details and background I see no reason to bring them off topic, but therés a good chance you won't get an answer as the question about got smudge and ansible vault here.
Main difference is that ansible is free, someone willing to tackle the problem can install, test and'maybe answer.

Hm, I didn't think about yes/or no having to pay for software But how about a variation like a "Saas"-system, where if my business depends on such system, and the Saas-vendor disappears? Actually there you are already with a first question: how do you handle such situation in the context of SE (what kind of solution would one recommend)? PS: and now time for a walk ... really ... it's urgent ...

I just mean that when you ask about licensed software, no one interested but not having a license can answer, thus reducing the chances to get an answer :)

Depositing to a Software Escrow is fundamentally just another variation of a delivery in the software development process. Which can considered for automation.
I'd definitely consider it on-topic for DevOps.


text:
Should we allow or ban version tags?
The question about "Upgrade from job-dsl to Jenkins 2 pipelines" contains these tags:

jenkins
jenkins2

Even though jenkins2 does not have any tag details yet, I bet it has to do with some specific version (or should I say release?) of Jenkins.
If my educated guess is right, then my real question here is this: should we yes or no have jenkins2 on top of jenkins?
For what it is worth:

Personally I'm PRO version tags, for reasons I would be happy to repeat as an answer here also.
Using version tags does NOT seem to fit with the common vision / recommendation of SE sites (my understanding: when old releases become unsupported and disappear, questions tagged with such version tag loose there value seen from an SE-business perspective).
From some recent experiences in some other SE site, the "guidance from the mods over there" has been to try to only use version specific tags when really needed (the remaining challenge being "when do you really need it").

Now what, how can you make an actual decision about this topic to avoid future discussions (to not say battles ...) and mistakes ...?
Note: a variation of such tags is what got asked in chat.DevOps.SE about circleci and circleci-2.0.

Jenkins 2 bring a far different approach than previous Jenkins release did, I think Jenkins 1.x is still there for a while as porting jobs is not that easy.
So for this specific case I'd vote yes keep both and handle the re tag when necessary.
One use of the tags is to allow someone to follow the question he/she's interested in, someone comfortable with Jenkins2 actually may not wish to follow questions on Jenkins 1 because an answer based on Jenkins 2 may not be applicable on Jenkins 1 at all, and checking the compatibility isn't its scope.
Main idea should be creating a tag for a version where the changes are majority of the release. That doesn't mean each major release because a major release could be done for only one or two breaking changes, keeping the overall behavior identical.
For example Chef13 will come in April with a bunch of breaking changes, the 12.5 version did bring a change on how to tackle custom resources, but those changes doesn't worth a tag per version as the majority of features stay the same.
The cut on the "majority of the release" should stay a case by case basis discussed here on meta in my opinion.

Gggggggggrrrrrrrrrreat ... I mean "merci" ... for your answer. It's exacty the kind of answer that I predict future discussions about ... I think it fits with "my" preference (= bullet 1 in my question), but conflicts with the 2nd/3rd bullet. Oh well, at least we have a meta question ready already for whenever the issue arrises ... time for a walk!

Versioning should not be allowed> Even with those differences. At the end OP or answer will specify the version

@romeo Then there would be only python tag on SO, and no python2 and python3. Keep in mind one use of the tags is to let people comfortable with the subject follow it. In the case of Jenkins, someone familiar with Jenkins 2 only may not answer properly a question targeting Jenkins 1.x which may need a plugin for something native in Jenkins 2

@Tensibai, the use case you explain is IMHO exception, not rule. Following your idea we should have versioning for every major (ot even minor) version.

@Romeo I forgot an important point, someone knowing he may miss something on question about Jenkins 1.x may wish to follow only Jenkins 2 questions. And yes, a tag per version where the changes are majority of the release. That doesn't mean each major because a major could be because of just one breaking change.


text:
Help promote this site for Drupal related DevOps topics?
There is a question on meta.drupal.SE about "Community Promotion Ads - 2017".
Here is one of the answers over there (disclosure: it's mine), to recommend devops.SE for Questions related to "DevOps topic about Drupal". For those who want (and are able) to consider doing so, please help me "push" it over there.
To get an idea of the DevOps questions over there, have a look at these search results:

jenkins hasaccepted:no
continuous hasaccepted:no

Hint: change '...:no' to '...:yes' is also interesting ...
Please reach out to whatever favorite SE site you have where there are similar promo ads, and post a similar answer of there (no credits due!).
Of course, if you're a Drupal.SE user also and like the idea, don't forget to help me reach the minimum voting balance of +6 (Kenorb, GoogleTorp, Adrian, where are you???).

In order to avoid such ads from being adversely regarded (as competing with / stealing audience from the respective sister sites) we could somehow present our site as a home for Q&As that would be DevOps-related but off-topic on those sites.

@DanCornilescu you mean a variation of this I assume.

Yes, that's exactly what I mean. I failed to see it :)

Hm, maybe my suggestion is not so good, judging by the comments on the swrecs ad...

Nice initiative!
But IMHO we should wait with such ads until the private beta ends.
We're still missing the core of moderators while the rep levels for various privileges are artificially lowered, potentially making it difficult to moderate a higher level of traffic normally expected in a public beta stage. See Don't raise rep requirements to public beta until pro-tem moderators have been empowered
Side note: a while ago I also placed a few such ads for the Area51 proposal (which still indicate the private beta status). Maybe of interest would be how these ads were received by the different communities :)

Community Promotion Ads - 2017 - Software Engineering Meta
Community Promotion Ads - 2017 - Unix & Linux Meta
Community Promotion Ads - 2017 - Server Fault Meta

Yes you may have "some" point, however there is also something like "keep the momentum" ...

@Pierre.Vriens OK, you're 1-2 votes away from moderator tools access. I'll help when I get there ;)


text:
Do we need a question to define what is behind the term "DevOps"?
We have a bunch of point of view about what is DevOps.
Some consider it's only about culture and organization, other use it as a generic term to encompass Agile/Lean/ methodology and process and some see it as a role due to a bunch of Job offers for a DevOps Engineer.
The question came to my mind after those questions:

What are some methods to measure the ROI for DevOps? where we have mainly 2 type of answer, one is mine aimed at culture/organization change, others are more aimed at the Software Engineering metric and automation
Would choosing the integration branch strategy be part of DevOps? where answers talk about DevOps engineer.
Is DevOps compatible with ITIL? which this time revolve around processes/practices.

In my opinion, DevOps is a culture and organization "model", there's practices (management, development and operations one) easier to achieve when this culture and org. is in place a but I don't feel Automation and any extreme programming method should be defined as DevOps.
If it's the case we'll always have a problem answering a question when the field is not determined, the question 1. above is a good example of this "too broad" interpretation in my opinion.
So should we have a "What is the definition of DevOps ?" on main site ?
Or am I just wrong thinking we should have a clear cut definition to avoid faceted answers ?

Kinda feel like someone answered that question already...

That's kind @Shog9 :) but my concern is more about a reference question to cut off debates and if it is really needed or not. I'm kinda worried about the multiples définitions of this site name and how it would influence it.

Well, this should clear things out :) What is DevOps?

@Pierre.Vriens - which is why deleting posts is IMHO not a good idea. Now it's just a matter of time until someone else asks that question... I'd suggest you undelete it and maybe edit it to not blatantly ask for opinions. There is a largely accepted answer to that question, which should be useful to clarify the term.

@Pierre not exactly surprising, calling for opinions verbatim is not really well received :( stating a position and asking what you missed could be better I think.

What I mean is that the question can be worded in a more closed manner to drive an answer backed up with littérature / references @pierre . I still haven't found a satisfying wording btw

No deal for disclosure @Peter. Happy to discuss it in depth tomorrow if it fits for you

The site is 24/7, I am not :)

Don't bother too much with downvotes @Pierre.Vriens :) (And this typo on my nick has already been done a bunch of times, sorry to say you're not the first one :D)

I tend to agree, although there are some reservations which need clear answers to really make it work well.
For example, when eventually a question like "What does a DevOps engineer do all day?" appears. Will it be closed as off-topic or 'too broad' with a link to "What is DevOps?" list of answers?
Most of us, who are involved with DevOps for long enough, and watched enough presentations and read some books - understand intuitively that it is not a job title or role. Yet many people in the real world do have these job titles and roles, and they didn't read any books or attended any conferences (yet). A good way to approach answering their questions should be defined as well, or else all their questions will by definition (pun intended) be off-topic.

I agree this won't solve all problems, but this may help addressing a too broad or misdefined question by pointing the asker to a reference so he/she can review the question with a more specific term. I've been really caught by the ROI one, where I felt it was quite broad but still with a precise goal and finally answers start to pile up in an approach I hadn't think of. Which makes me think the question is not enough specified finally.

The other, slightly flippant, answer to this question is:

If you were to ask 10 people what DevOps is you would get 10 different answers.

— DevOps.com
I am also of the opinion that DevOps is a Culture and multiple Operating Model span Software Development and Technical Operations making it very difficult to define in absolute terms, some have tried such as the DevOps Manifesto:

We are uncovering better ways of running
  systems by doing it and helping others do it.
  Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes over tools
Working systems over comprehensive documentation
Customer and developer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
  the right, we value the items on the left more.

It's difficult. For a subject like DevOps, it's very appealing to say, "Let's decide what's DevOps and what isn't, so we can just point to it when people aren't sure what it is!", or, "Let's make one huge answer to be a canonical duplicate for every future question!".
Something like that, where you just ask "What is DevOps?", is not likely to work on Stack Exchange, where answers should aim to be verifiably correct with proof (see the Back It Up! principle).
Asking what DevOps is makes people respond with what they consider to be DevOps, so, as noted by Richard Slater, you end up with 10 different answers from 10 different people.
Some criteria to help write a question which avoids this trap:

Does the question have a practical answer? Asking what is or isn't DevOps is one thing, but why does it really matter if you count [insert favourite tool/process] as DevOps? Real questions have answers, and the answers should solve a problem rather than just discuss the question.
Is the scope reasonable enough that you could actually answer the question? DevOps is generally considered to be quite a diverse area with many different tools, ideas, processes and people—could an answer to 'What is DevOps?' really do that justice in one post?
Can the answers prove that they're right? Opinion-based answers, spam and non-answers thrive on questions that are really open and quite subjective. If you ask specifically for what certain groups think about DevOps, you can get an accurate, factual answer. If you just ask what DevOps 'is' (which usually gets interpreted as 'What do you think DevOps is?'), problems start to arise.

If you can write a question like that well, that would be a rather great accomplishment, and I certainly hope that someone manages it.
Regarding the 'DevOps as a Role' issue, I've attempted to ask a question that has practical answers on it: Why shouldn't I try to hire a 'DevOps Engineer'?

My idea is more about having descriptive answer to point toward so people can refine their question when they use devops term à se  portemanteau. But maybe it would be too long to be useful at all.

@Tensibai It is an idea that's appealing, but from my (admittedly limited) experience it doesn't work well. It was tried on IoT at the start of the beta, but there are 5 contradictory answers because everyone sees IoT differently. Since DevOps is also a little bit less clearly defined, I fear it will suffer the same problem and just cause more arguments about whether the DevOps definition the site uses is 'correct'.

Agree, that's why it has to be worded in a way to avoid contradictory points, which sounds hard. Maybe a question "Is really DevOps a role ?" should be a better approach to what I had in mind when writing this question at first.

We deal with this problem at the Hermeneutics.SE all the time: Many questions are too broad and/or primarily opinion based. The solution is all in how you ask. So instead, of asking "What is DevOps" ask more narrow, pointed questions like "What are are the 'Three Ways' of DevOps?" or "What is Kanban and why is it used in DevOps?"
Once you successfully eaten all of the parts of the elephant, you can start a Meta question to collect a list of them in one place.
On the other hand, this answer is a pretty succinct description of what DevOps is...

Yes. There can be a question to define what is DevOps. (And receive 10, or more answers (: )
No. The answer should not be used as a yardstick to filter what questions can be asked.
Let see, let's start redirecting AWS CLI questions to Stack Overflow; what tools to use questions to Software Recommendations;  culture questions to The WorkPlace; security questions to Information Security; database questions to Database Administrators; network questions to Network Engineering; kanban questions to Software Engineering; ...
Oh, we are left with questions that ask what is DevOps!
The fact that this site come into existence means there is a broad interest in the DevOps movement.
Why do I ask my "how to handle application secrets" here instead of Server Fault?
Because there are people in the same devops journey that understands where the question is coming from, have done that, and have a solution.
DevOps in itself is multi-facets. It is natural that questions will be multi-facets as well.
I'm for a broader, encompassing view.
Oh dear! Am I writing an answer or an opinion?

Apologies. I might not have understood your question. Do you mean to have a definition of DevOps so that answer can only be fitted to the definition? .... btw, what is "fantasmated"

Nevermind, I feel I'm less and less in line with the direction this site is going after. So I'll just take a step back and see how it evolves. But indeed the point here was not a filter question, just a canonical one to point all those question melting DevOps with a Role, which are useless as there's multiple roles in a devops org, and I know no one encompassing all of them. But seems the community is in favor of using this word as a role, so let's see..


text:
Is asking for an explanation of DevOps-related terminology on-topic?
This DevOps site is amazing (I think). It continues to surprise me how many questions or answers contain specific terminology (DevOps related) that to me fit in either of these categories:

I don't understand what they mean.
I never heard about them before.
They seem to be like a new name (or synonym) for something else (which I'm familiar with already for a long time).

Consider these questions:

What is Value Stream Mapping?
What is "black box" testing?
What is Serverless?
What does a "DevOps Transformation" contain?
What is a 'Feature Flag Toggle' and when to use them (or not)? (disclosure: mine)

Are suchs questions on-topic here, or should I rather not ask them and do some (re-)search instead?

I think a Community Wiki (CW) question titled "Glossary of DevOps terminology" could be a valid solution to put terms and links toward their deifinition. But maybe a question by term and then a glossary CW could be a good fit.

@Tensibai Why would it have to be a CW? Why not just let the reputation encourage (or punish ...) users who ask good (or bad) questions about these zillions of terms, acronyms, etc), and eventually also reward the best answers to them accordingly? On top of that, this could result in the long run to this site becoming TheReference for learning the DesOps-language ... Attention: think 3 times before approving such kind of questions to be on topic (SRE, Hackatons, Containers, etc)

Well, see the second part. Main idea behind a CW is that trusted people can edit them (100 rep needed in public beta). allowing to share the maintenance load while giving an answer/target to close others question as duplicate. I don't think we're here to build a dictionary and I personally worship at the church of research, so maybe none of my options above are a good idea and we should just close them as off-topic.

At least for the terms which have a corresponding tag IMHO a better vehicle for offering the definition would be through edits (or propose edits to) the tag's info. Much easier to access the info, canonical, etc. Or maybe port the clear winner answer to the tag info later one? Just a thought...

I'm glad you've brought this up. There are two aspects I see about these questions:
Are they on-topic?
Yes, I think so. It'd be hard for me to argue that questions about serverless computing, feature flags and black box testing aren't relevant to the topics of a DevOps-related Q&A site. But...
Are they questions we should encourage?
Probably not, especially in the expert-level private beta phase. The idea is that questions should be setting the tone and showing new users what this site is about.
You could almost say, "We gave DevOps experts a few weeks to come up with the best questions they could—questions which can be used to make the case for creating a new site—and they came up with these.".
Questions like "What is X?" or "Why should I use Y?" do not make the case. The blog post Are Some Questions Too Simple? makes this point well in my view, so I'll quote it here:

The key distinction to make here, in my mind, is that all questions are ultimately in service of the people answering them. That is the audience you need to satisfy if you want to have any hope of creating and sustaining a community of peers learning from each other. The minimum bar for a question is not “is this on-topic?”, but rather “is this somewhat interesting and on-topic?”. I’m not saying every question needs to be utterly fascinating, but please endeavor to make your questions more than a constant stream of no-duh underhanded softballs requiring nothing more than a quick cut and paste from Wikipedia, IMDB, or some other standard internet reference site.
There’s nothing useful any expert can learn from ultra-basic questions. Allow your Q&A; community to fill itself with enough “General Reference” type questions and you’ll soon find no experts there at all.

(emphasis mine)
However, the 'General Reference' close reason was abandoned because it ended up being used to get rid of anything that people didn't like. As stated in this Meta answer, it didn't pan out quite like you might hope, and I would imagine being on the receiving end felt a bit harsh—some users thought your question was too simple, so, no answer for you!

If you take nothing else from my post, I strongly encourage everyone to review the page you were shown before asking your first question:

You get the site you build
The first questions set the tone and topic of a site for a long time. Those early questions say a lot about what your community could become. And questions asked during the private beta will be on the front page when potential experts see your site for the first time. So please make those first questions exemplary ones that are interesting, challenging, and worthy of imitation.

Make this site worth opening up, and it'll do well. Allow this site to fill up with questions that are better answered by Googling, and people will just turn to Google instead.

The DevOps field does has a lot of interesting questions available via Google searching. But, unlike IMBD where you can find everything you'd want about a certain movie. In DevOps there is no definitive source where a person can go and find all the important DevOps topics. The information is usually available, but scattered across the internet. Some of the "basic" questions that ask about it are the filled with answers that contain (should contain) multiple reference links to multiple places that are not "easy" to come by in random browsing.

@Evgeny: A 'basic' question is fine when all the existing resources aren't great, and you can say "I've looked at X and Y, but I still don't understand Z." Showing the prior research also helps people to get an idea what the OP actually wants to know, specifically.

IMHO yes, they should be on-topic. I'll try to present my reasoning.
They are DevOps-related to start with, which is what this site is about.
There may be gazillions of answers out there, maybe a google click away. But they are out there, not on this site, i.e.:

just as good as link-only answers
without any chance of contributing to this site being a reference resource, regardless of their absolute value
without the "validation" resulting from SE's voting and reputation systems
without the ability to have their absolute value increased via edits and comments, etc.

See also Ban LMGTFY (let me google that for you) links. While there you may want to note the wide range of opinions about that post as well, I'd expect an opinion spectrum for this question at least just as wide :)

Merci for this interesting viewpoint / answer / link. I think it somehow supports the comment I already posted below my question. And not to change the subject of my question, or to hijack your answer, but how about any type of "mainframe" DevOps term that you wonder about (I'd love to be challenged on more or less any of those) ... As a sample, if I'd post a question like "What are the pros and cons of using PDS versus PDSE file formats to be used for shipping executables to production environments?" If that would be an on-topic question, would you know what PDS and PDSE means?

@Pierre.Vriens. Unsure - I had no exposure to mainframes. But I'm thinking that if I'd like to know what those mean I should be able to ask that, especially if that's relevant from DevOps prospective (which could be true if the original question is on-topic).

I tend to be in favor of two kinds of terminology-related questions.
The first are comparison questions.  These are where there are two (or sometimes three) terms that, to someone reading their individual definitions, seem confusingly similar.  Answers to these questions then focus on the subtle distinctions or implications of the queried terms in a way that you wouldn't get from a dictionary; you may find them online, but often that's at a Stack Exchange site. ;)  A devops.SE example might be "What's the difference between continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment?".
Secondly, it can be very helpful to have canonical answers to common questions, and sometimes these questions are asking what some term means.  It's important for the answers here to not merely be a definition, but to fully explain the concept.  In the "What is Serverless?" question linked in the question, a good answer (like the one we have from Aurora0001) does not merely define serverless, but explains the motivations behind it and why you would want to choose it (or choose to not use it).


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What are the criteria for a high quality question title?
While using the collection of SE sites that I participate in, I've discovered various reasons about why the title of a question is, IMO, extremely important. Just consider the very first feature you see at work when you type the title when posting a new question (ie the Questions that may already have your answer that show up, dynamically, while you type).
So as per the title of this question (oeps!): What are the criteria for a high quality question title? If you were to write something like guidelines about the perfect question title, what would those guideine be?
If you wonder why I ask (or don't think it really matters), how about these pseudo-random picks (in a random order):

Loadbalancing nexus artifact repository
What is a 'Feature Flag Toggle' and when to use them (or not)?
Ansible Dynamic Inventory - generate inventory with ip addresses under specific tag with underscore instead of dot
Problem in integrating Travis-CI with core PHP projects
What's the difference between checkin and checkout?
Simple CI/CD Containers in AWS
How do I run ansible on one host at a time and break on a failure

PS 1: This may be a question that may be a better fit for meta.SE. Anybody wiling to do so: go ahead and migrate it to over there ...
PS 2: did my question content (more or less) match your expection before you actually opened/read it? If not: what else did you expect this question to be about?

related

@Tensibai indeed "related", but my question is specifically about the title of any question, while the related answer does not even include the word "title". FYI: "after lunch" (how was yours?), I plan to post my own answer to this question, in which I plan to include (constructive) critique to some of the 7 questions I linked to and to also share some of my recommendations to pick a title.

Lunch was good thanks ;) I'm on my way writing an answer.

My advice for a good title is to summarize as precisely as possible what the question is about the way you may ask it to a colleague.
So you may wish to be precise and avoid too long titles or to mimic a book title, main goal behind this, is that search engines are more likely to present your question as search result if it match what you would have asked.
From your list of examples (which I didn't open to stay on the tittle only as far as I can):

Links 1 and 7 sounds ok to me.
The 2 has the problem of being a question and its follow up question, I'd argue it worth two question so answers stay focused on one thing and get more details.
The tittle is descriptive enough.
3 start with its tags and is super long, I'd write it as "How can I generate inventory by a tag with underscores in Ansible Dynamic Inventory" and extend the details in the question itself. That would be more straight to the point with still the important information.
4 give no idea of what the problem is, sounds begging for a tutorial about travis and PHP (and was more or less the case if I remember it well)
5 It miss a subject to narrow it, are we talking about code, organization time management, issue time metric ?
6 Says what technology it is about, but it's not obvious if it's about a configuration problem, a technical problem, a process problem or a call to advices/How to.

As is, only with he title there's only one I have an idea how to reword, for the others, I'd have to open the question and deduct/guess what the author has in mind.
For reference, Jon Skeet's blog entry about how to write a good question has valuable informations.

Hm, looks like you have pretty similar opinions on this like me, merci! Though I think there is a conflict in your answer for "5." (is it realy "OK", as in your first bullet?). If you can/want (some day, no rush), can you think of a few "commandements" you could add to your answers that someone could use as a guide for creating a question title that would, for sure, get Tensibai's pre-approval?

@Pierre.Vriens indeed, at first glance it sounded ok, thinking more about it while writing made me found a glitch about it.

If this was a test (oeps) to verify my QA-reading of answers, then I trust you agree that the test succeeded, i.e. because my first QA-reading of your answer resulted in a valid failure ... I bet there is yet another DevOps thing (term, procedure, whatever) for this also ... and no "I" will not post that as a new question ... to avoid I run into a B37-abend (oep, that's  mainframe speak, and possible DevOps topic, not many users around here will understand).

I've fighted with zOS long ago and indeed forgotten a whole bunch of terms. We only have RPG as 'proprietary'' languages here and the QA is handled by a specific team. I don't think there's something specific to devops, Quality Acceptance is still Quality Acceptance, whatever the teams/company organization is.


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Are DevOps related SW recommendations on-topic (or not)?
This question is a re-iteration of the Area 51 - question about "Would Devops-related SW recommendations be on-topic on DevOps?", in which this question was asked:

One of the reasons for the DevOps proposal is to have a common place for asking a variety of kinds of questions which as a whole wouldn't be on-topic for related sites like StackOverflow, SuperUser, etc.
SW recommendations would normally go to softwarerecs.stackexchange.com, but would it be acceptable to have them on DevOps as well (if they are DevOps-related, of course)? IMHO yes, for the same reason.
To clarify, quality criteria similar to those on softwarerecs.stackexchange.com would apply, for both questions and answers (eventually updated as needed for Devops-specific scope, if needed).

Since the quoted question does not have an "accepted" answer, I wonder what the correct answer (not opinions ...) to that question is, now that this site is in (private) beta.
PS: Is there a CI tool that guarantees no regressions in the branch quality level? is another example.

No matter how much "I" would like such questions to be considered as NOT off-topic (= on-topic?), looking at it with a perspective like "Building a repository of high quality Questions and Answers", the answer is something along the lines like:

Those kinds of questions are to be considered as off-topic.

Some more details to better explain this answer:

Consider the Drupal Answers site (= DA.SE), and know that in Drupal there is a famous answer to mostly any question, which is like "There is a module for it!" (modules are like plugins, and anything you do in Drupal requires custom or contributed modules).
But, a question like "Is there a module for it?" is consider as O.F.F.-topic (no typo, I repeat: O.F.F.-topic).

It took me a while to understand why that was the case for DA.SE. And many, many of my (upvoted) answers to questions about "module recommendations" (question like "Which module can I use to do X or Y in Drupal?") got deleted (not just closed ...) as off-topic.
After digging deeper in the SE-concepts, I have learned that on many sites similar software recommendations are also considered as off-topic, mostly with an explanation like "they are simply not a good fit for Q&A sites".
My recommendation

Option 1: Teach users who ask questions about SW recommendations to rephrase their question to How to questions about the actual issue they want to address. That kind of questions leaves plenty of room to post answers that are ... about SW recommendations that may be a perfect fit.
Option 2: Promote questions about SW recommendations to be posted on the SE-site that is dedicated to only that, i.e. ... Software Recommendations (disclosure: I'm a reviewer there ...)!
Option 3: Consider the Software Recommendations site as a possible migration target for any such questions on DevOps that get closed as off-topic. But make sure that only high quality questions are considered for such possible migration.

To complement: "they are simply not a good fit for Q&A sites". Mainly because they attract spam or one liners saying  "Use X, you'll be surprised how awesome it is". which may be true at time of reading, but not 6 month later, and then you see old question bumped on the homepage each time a newcomer think he can earn rep by adding his own brick to this question.

There are three potential pitfalls with these questions:

No actual problem to be solved. This is a show-stopper: if there's no problem to be solved, then how does anyone know if they have a solution? The question becomes subjective or unbounded: "list me all container engines" or "what's your favorite build manager?"
Fortunately, most of the folks who need to ask these questions do have an actual problem they're looking to solve - they've just assumed that the solution will take a particular form, and thus produced an X-Y question. Demanding that all recommendation questions describe the problem to be solved side-steps this issue.

No actual solutions. This is the one where every spammer descends on the site to post links to their webpage in response to these questions, and is strongly encouraged by pitfall #1 - if you're just looking for a list of things, "this is a thing" becomes a valid (albeit terribly unhelpful) answer.
Ruthlessly culling answers that don't describe a specific solution to the problem in the question avoids this issue.

Out-of-date answers. This is slightly less of a concern for software recommendations; you know that "best price/capacity SSD" is gonna age pretty fast, but an answer that describes how to configure a certain software package to solve a specific problem could potentially remain valid for years.
Critically, focusing on the how rather than the what makes it much easier to determine when an answer has gone to seed; if you've avoided pitfalls #1 and #2, you'll be well-prepared to handle #3 as well.

Thus, my advice is to allow these questions for now, keeping these pitfalls in mind and also the guidance found on Software Recommendations' Ask page:

Tell us...

...the task you want to accomplish
...your requirements for that task
...what you already know about software available for this purpose

Then, write a specific and to-the-point title

One caution: avoid a rec-question gold-rush. It's really tempting, when these sites are just getting started, to post a bunch of fake "recommendation" questions for software you already use, mostly as a way to get to know what everyone else is using. These are worthless long-term, and set a bad example for everyone who follows - if you're bored & just wanna know what software your peers are happy with, drop into chat & ask them!

Well... It's that straightforward. Nothing I describe here is easy - it requires constant vigilance. But, nothing good comes easy.

I don't think a blanket correct answer to this question exists.
Some argue that such questions are simply not a good fit for Q&A sites. That'd be a blanket statement. The very existence of Software Recommendations proves they can be a good fit for a Q&A site and, more importantly, even by StackExchange standards.
Ok, so what makes a software recommendation question on-topic or off-topic on a particular SE site?

on SO all such questions are off topic
on Software Recommendations there are pretty clear guidelines for both questions and answers
on DevOps - still TBD presently

And even if the context of the recommendation question is very specific and well defined, making it a good fit for Software Recommendations it still doesn't necessarily mean it should be off-topic here. If it's DevOps related it should IMHO be on-topic on DevOps - after all one of the reasons for DevOps is to be a one-stop shop for all DevOps-related Q&As, see Isn't duplicate of server fault? And maybe http://meta.devops.stackexchange.com/questions/3/should-we-start-moving-on-topic-questions-from-so-and-serverfault-to-here
Looking at it from a different prospective: to have some decent odds of getting quality and timely DevOps-related software/tool recommendations a lot of DevOps experts would have to also be fairly active on Software Recommendations. Meaning less time spent on the DevOps site itself :)
Finally, the most important category of software recommendations questions I'd like to see on-topic on this site are the not-so-well-defined context ones which wouldn't make it on Software Recommendations or some other SE site:

DevOps related
maybe with connections to other posts covering in one way or the other the specific aspect for which the request for the recommendation is made
even if not particularly tied to a specific application context (OS/language/framework/etc) - they can still be valuable for reference from wider scope questions (culture/guidelines/process/etc) which I believe we'll see on this site

Also I think we shouldn't necessarily expect a correct answer from these questions. Or non-opinionated answers. Just like on Software Recommendations the answers will be opinionated and it's perfectly OK to not have an accepted one.
Assuming in the end software recommendations won't get banned on this site additional meta questions would take care of the actual guidelines of declaring them on/of-topic.


text:
Dealing with too generic questions
First of all, the question linked below is just to illustrate my more general concerns.
After this question Which plugin should I use to get started with Jenkins to manage mainframe components in PDS format? which has a real value for a canonical point of view.
I've the feeling we have a problem trying to create canonical questions.
The problem I see here is that it miss a practical goal. There's no clue of what is intended to do with jenkins, which by nature is very volatile from just linting jobs to Continuous Delivery pipeline.
I assume this is due to the wish to create a canonical question from problems encountered or question we had ourselves and willing to write them in a less 'personal' way so they are useful to more people.
There's others examples which have the same kind of problem in my opinion.

What is a 'Feature Flag Toggle' and when to use them (or not)? first revision, which has been edited in a better format
How is Ansible different from simply running a provisioning bash shell in Vagrant? which could be worded differently by taking an actual use case so answers can focus on what gives an advantage over the other and extend on a more generic comparison
How to design authentication and authorization in micro-services architecture? first revision, which again should be more focused.
How to design authentication and authorization in micro-services architecture? same as above in its current version, still with a generic goal.

What I fear is that either answers will be very long (if they fit in 30k chars) or that it will attract a bunch of vague answers on what is better to do on answer's author opinion, not exactly addressing the concerns and/or missing part of the question by focusing on only one point.
While we can downvote, and then delete bad answers, this may create a lot of clean up work which would be better spend elsewhere.
So my question is: should we not aim at more focused and practical questions to avoid this ?
Like those:

How to persuade developers to start using feature flag toggles?
How can I communicate queue-based processing delays to non-technical team members?

Interesting question, but before posting "my" recommendation ("some day"), I suggest you try to rework your 2nd parg (with the 4 inks) in it. Even if it was only to avoid your question looses (some) value if (eg) "I" would delete "my" comment you linked to (just include a reevant quote here?). And maybe also relace the "other", "which" and "kind" link-titles with the actual titles of what they link to (just in case these linked questions get deleted). Just a suggestion ...

@Pierre.Vriens I hope you don't feel targeted personally , my concerns are really on the questions format. I'll see how to reword this after lunch. I'm probably formatted by meta SO where linking multiples questions on a sentence is ´usual' but I see why it could be bad here.

Don't worry, I don't feel like so (if ever needed I'll "say what I think ... that is my REAL rep ...). And my "delete my own comment" from before (now deleted), was only to bring to your attention the "feature flag/toggle"-link thing (= delete of my own comment) that I could "use" (abuse?) to ruin part of your question here (which is definitely not what "I" plan to do, though some day a mod may do so instead of me ...). About meta.SO: I'm waiting for a miracle to happen there some day (contact me for details if needed),


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Rename feature-flags to feature-toggles?
The feature-flags tag appears to be about Feature Flag Toggles, also called  Feature Toggles.
I suggest to call a cat a cat, and rename this tag to feature-toggles

I don't think the tag has to be renamed nor to be set as synonym. There could be valid questions about feature flags (formalism, documentation about them, process of definition), which may not be related to feature toggles but to feature ramp up which carry a less binary meaning.
Of course this is terminology only, it's just to ease in a classification goal more than objective definition.
So I'd leave those tags as is, and tag edit the questions which need it.
For generic purposes:
If you think questions are wrongly tagged, edit them. If there's too much to edit, then open a meta post to coordinate efforts.

Interesting answer, didn't realize that ... Have you seen my question I just posted about it?

Yep, just seen it,  my point was more that feature toggles carry a binary on/off meaning, which is not always the case. So relaxing the terminology on tags is not harmful in my opinion.

@Pierre.Vriens edited to avoid the confusion, I should have said it at first. It probably sounded too obvious in my mind :)

OK for me. BTW, I "hope" it's OK (in this phase of the private beta), to post these kinds of (possibly basic) questions about some terminology being used (by experts who don't even realizes these kinds of terms / nuances sound like chinese to other people).

No problem for me. I think this meta shows we can have multiples views about it and the question sounds ok to me. Not eveything has to be named "exactly", we have to cope with reality of our work. :)

which may not be related to feature toggles but to feature ramp up... Could you please add an actual example? I can't really follow - to me it sounds like you'd be talking about features in general, not about feature-flags.

@DanCornilescu I'm talking about how those flags impact/enable the feature on a wider point of view of the app. It could be an implementation of on/off or rand(100)<10 to get only 10% of requests getting the feature enabled. (And in extreme cases, the 10 is the result of function taking in account day of week/time, etc. to avoid impacting too much people during high traffic)

@Tensibai OK. I see. Though one may argue that the toggle would still be enabled, only its behaviour would be different. IMHO rather narrow usage percentage to warrant a non-synonym tag which could also cover the much wider common usage. Either cover that small percentage through the actual question details or create a more specific tag for it, say feature-flags-gradual or something like that.

@DanCornilescu For now, creating a tag with no question will be useless as the cleaning mechanism would remove it... But I just gave my position here, a majority seems to agree with you for a synonym so maybe let's go for that.

@DanCornilescu the tag creation privilege will be only at 150 in public beta, we will probably have people adding tags by their use more than 'formal' tags and creating them by mistake. Either we will have to request a higher rep to create tags or we'll have to handle the problem when it comes

Let's handle it when we get there - we may be worrying for nothing. If it proves it's indeed an issue it'd still be a good thing - it means we'd be having a lot of user activity on the site :)

They could also both exist, as synonym tags: What are tag synonyms and merged tags? How do they work?
If we have to choose one of them (as the main and/or only tag) my vote goes with your feature-toggles proposal as IMHO it indeed represents the concept better.

Thank for your support! Your alternative could work for me too. And if some day a Hillary.Trumph tag is needed, then Donald.Clinton would be a possible alternative to that too, no?

More a bit in reply to Tensibal, I don't know about renaming this specific tag, I do know that you do not want both a feature-flags and a feature-toggles tag.
Tags are used to show related questions on the left side. I use tags to set tag favorites and search for questions. You can also let SE sent you a weekly newsletter based on your tags. Also tags are useful for searching for something.
If the tags are too specific, they do not have any use. Try to come up with one tag that covers the whole area.

May make more sense under this question. For this specific case, well, I gave my point of view about them, Dan gave another option. You imperiously say we don't want both, but you don't give a real rationale of why one tag for both would be better. (and questions can have multiples tags)

@Tensibai I'm with 7ochem here: having 2 tags which overlap 80% is not good - those interested would have to follow 2 tags instead of 1. Instead it'd be better to have one common tag plus 2 very specific tags which can be used as filters if needed. Also - without the tag usage definition info in place one can't tell if the 2 tags are/should indeed be synonyms or not, making this discussion rather moot.

@DanCornilescu Probably a question of culture, I hear feature flag more often as a generic term than feature toggles, and the last is usually with a clear binary implication. Actually we have a grand total of 6 question on those tags, 2 having both. I'm unsure this is a problem ATM.


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Should we copy (re-ask) the Area51 DevOps-related **discussions** here?
IMHO several of the Area51 meta-style discussions related to the DevOps proposal during its definition phase are still quite relevant and would very well belong here.
Should we copy/ask them here as well? Together with the answers or just with a reference to the original (which also has the answers)?

Could you check whether some Q&As could still be copied? Please let me know if I could help.

Certainly, but when I get back from vacation, in about 2 weeks. Thx.

Some of these were re-asked here again in some fashion. It would be better imho to have it all in a single place though.

IMHO these discussions (maybe not with all answers) would still be worthy candidates for migration/copy here today:

On why having a DevOps q&a website would be useful for many
How do we help visitors to ask their question on an appropriate SE site, while implementing a welcoming and benevolent attitude?
Do we discuss here as well the about the good practises on how to build the right mindset/cultural in a organisation?
Would Devops-related SW recommendations be on-topic on DevOps?
DevOps Site Description- too narrow?

Some of them would need edits as the site is now a reality, unless we indicate the context.
How do we go about it (if there's agreement on doing it, of course)?


text:
Opinions or not opinions?
During the (multiple) definition phases we discussed (quite) a bit about how opinionated answers would be accepted or received by this community.
Was a consensus reached about this topic? Not aware if some more reasoning was made towards up/down-voting based on opinions, but I believe that can quickly become a problem if we accept opinions and don't shape some kind of "acceptance policy" (mmh, couldn't think of any better wording) about voting.
I am sure this has been on discussed in other communities meta sites, unfortunately I am not very active in metas, please enlighten me. There are already a couple of "suspicious" votes I have spotted on the most broader questions.

somehow related: http://meta.devops.stackexchange.com/questions/63/should-we-copy-re-ask-the-area51-devops-related-discussions-here

Directly related to this question - http://discuss.area51.stackexchange.com/questions/26466/devops-site-description-too-narrow

I am against opinionated answers, unless an answer has some basis in formal theory (books, articles on HBR, etc...). Or there is a case study that has been presented in a public forum (conference, meetup) regarding a method that works - an opinion is not a good answer and should be downvoted and preferably removed.
At the same time, I believe that questions must not be voted to be closed because someone has an opinion that all answers will be opinionated. That is just killing a source of great knowledge without even allowing people to try and answer.
There are plenty of questions that ask very basic things, and in other context would be assumed to bring only opinionated answers. For example, "How do I persuade my boss to do X?". In the DevOps StackExchange, there ARE answers that come from formal theory (books, articles, etc...) and based on case studies of companies who are talking about their DevOps journey/transformation. These questions should be left open IMHO so that knowledgable people can collect and contribute the knowledge, turning this website into a very valuable resource for companies wishing to undergo a journey into DevOps.
To quote my comment on https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/26466/devops-site-description-too-narrow

There a ton of definitive knowledge that spans thousands of books and more than a hundred years of human endeavor. That knowledge has been battle tested in the field in many other industries, and also in IT. Just because most people have not read the books, and are not aware of this knowledge, does not mean the every answer to such questions is going to be an "opinion".

The above is also currently described at https://devops.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask

Some subjective questions are allowed, but “subjective” does not mean “anything goes”. All subjective questions are expected to be constructive. What does that mean? Constructive subjective questions:

inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”
tend to have long, not short, answers
have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone
invite sharing experiences over opinions
insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references
are more than just mindless social fun

While i really appreciate your answer, I was asking about downvotes (or upvotes) on slightly (or fairly) opinionated answers, not the acceptance of the answers themselves. Sorry if that was not clear.

When/if an answer is an opinion without any real basis behind it ... then it should be downvoted. Facts, not conjectures.

Ok; while I see this pragmatic approach good for devops tooling, I still see the boundary for deciding what "backed by fact" might be, in relation to practices, quite unreliable

@ᴳᵁᴵᴰᴼ why? there are certainly a much larger body of knowledge (books, articles) for practices and methods than there is on each tool.

well to be honest I still have to find my "effective Java" of DevOps (I come form a development background), and so many articles about devops on the web, gosh, are opinionated... but maybe i just misunderstood your point, I thought you were only keen to accept formally defined or accepted topics, while after reading your answer again, you just want to avoid the risk of collapsing in a continuous flame with people coming out of the blue, which makes sense

Oh, definitely most articles on the web about DevOps are just for buzz and don't really hold any valuable information. But not ALL articles and books are like that, it takes some digging but there are gems. I'm trying to expose those in my answers around this site.