[openstack-dev] TC candidacy

Mark McLoughlin markmc at redhat.com
Mon Oct 7 14:58:07 UTC 2013


Hi

I'd like to offer my self as a candidate for the Technical Committee
election.


About me

I've been working on OpenStack for over two years now and have
particularly focused my contributions on Nova and Oslo, but have also
contributed in smaller ways to most other OpenStack projects.

For the past year or more, I've been a member of the Technical Committee
as Oslo PTL.

I'm a proud Red Hatter and am also a member of the OpenStack Foundation
Board of Directors.


The Past Year

I'm very happy with some of the progress and decisions the TC made over
the past year.

We welcomed Heat, Ceilometer, Trove, Savannah, Marconi into the
OpenStack family either as integrated or incubating projects. The TC
carefully considered each of these applications and my own rule of thumb
was "does it have a healthy contributor community and is it a sensible
growth of OpenStack's scope?". I love to see this sustainable growth in
our project and community.

In a similar vein, I'm really excited that TripleO has been added as an
official OpenStack program. One of OpenStack's biggest criticisms has
always been that it is difficult to deploy and manage. TripleO is an
awesome idea but, more importantly, is a way for all of us to work
together to build tools and processes for deploying and managing our
software.

In terms of more meta changes, I'm really happy that the TC has moved to
a model where all seats are directly elected. This removed the concern
that adding new projects would make the TC unmanageably large so that
can no longer be used as an excuse to not add new projects. I also hope
that this election model will result in more members who are interested
in cross-project concerns.

I'm proud of the work we did with the foundation board to adopt the term
"integrated" as a way to separate the TC controlled "accepted into the
OpenStack integrated release process" status from the board controlled
"allowed to use associate OpenStack trademark" status. This is really
important because it allows the TC to evaluate new project applications
on a purely technical basis.

I think it's really positive that we adopted the concept of "programs"
as a recognition that not all important efforts and contributor groups
are focused around a particular server project. Our community has a very
diverse set of contributor groups and all of them play an important
role.

Finally, I'm happy to see us starting to use gerrit to track TC
decisions in a way that is easily referenceable. Looking back over the
last year of TC decisions would have been a lot easier with 'git log'!
See https://review.openstack.org/50066 :)


Next Year

I want to see the TC continue to be welcoming to new projects and
contributor groups. That said, I'd like us to continue improve how we
deliberate over these applications. For example, maybe we assign
specific TC members with aspects of the project to report back on - e.g.
architecture, development process, contributor diversity, test coverage,
etc.

I'm also really eager to encourage any experiments with evolving our
project governance model. I think we're seeing several projects with
multiple leaders who are essentially peers and having to choose a PTL
can be an artificial elevation of one person over their peers. I stepped
down as Oslo PTL because I want Oslo to have a bunch of strong leaders,
rather than be dominated by one person.

Finally, I'd like the TC to be used more often as a forum for people to
develop their ideas about the project. We should view the TC as a group
of project leaders who are happy, as a group, to help people out with
advice and mentorship.


Thanks,
Mark.




More information about the OpenStack-dev mailing list