Open Stack

I am Dean Troyer here to nominate myself as a candidate for the upcoming
Technical Committee election.

I have been involved with OpenStack for a long time, working on the
implementation at NASA of what became Nova. Since then I have been heavily
involved in a number of projects: I was an early contributor to DevStack
and served as its PTL during its short tenure as a stand-alone program, and
started Grenade to use DevStack as the basis for upgrade testing. I also
started the OpenStackClient project to address the disparity in user
interface experience in our CLI tools and have been working down the client
stack to improve the application developer experience using the client
libraries. I currently work for Nebula Inc. from my home in the hotbed of
overachiever baseball, Kansas City MO.

Recently some ideas I wrote down regarding the technical relationship of
OpenStack projects escaped into the wild and became part of the current
re-thinking of what OpenStack should look like. I think these ideas are a
result from a practical approach to building useful systems and identifying
the natural characteristics of both the projects and the people driving
them. Technical relationships might not define organizational
relationships, but they often look similar in the end.

The major changes being discussed are required as a result of the
tremendous growth of OpenStack and the changes in incentives for
contribution. This growth also feeds a desire to be all things to all
participants that simply is not possible at this scale. We can not rewind
the clock to the simpler times of 5 projects, but we can recover some of
the characteristics of those days by growing through division into a larger
number of smaller tents.

I'll be happy to answer specific questions beyond the ones below…

Topic: OpenStack Mission
How do you feel the technical community is doing in meeting the OpenStack
Mission?
I think the rapid growth in the number of incubated/integrated projects has
diluted the TC focus and attention and it has become clear that ignoring
the natural strata of OpenStack projects is not working.

Topic: Technical Committee Mission
How do you feel the technical committee is doing in meeting the technical
committee mission?
I think this and the previous question are intertwined at this point and it
is time to do a sanity check on where we are and where we want to go. This
conversation has started and there is no clear answer yet.

Topic: Contributor Motivation
How would you characterize the various facets of contributor motivation?
I think at a high level this is one of the motivations to re-evaluate our
existing structure. We are a corporate-driven project and in spite of
individual efforts to remain independent the corporate influence is being
felt in ways that the individuals may have not anticipated, ie, being
'Integrated' is the most valuable attribute for a project, and is the
indicator for investment for many corporate managers.

At an individual level I see people who want to make a better cloud and
make the tools and components to get us there. We have some procedural
things to smooth out (CLA, etc) and some significant scaling issues to
address (review backlogs) in order to retain and utilize the energy being
brought to OpenStack by new contributors.

Topic: Rate of Growth
There is no argument the OpenStack technical community has a substantial
rate of growth. What are some of the consequences of this rate?
As I wrote above, we have lost focus as we have attempted to widen the
scope of integrated projects. Rather than do a smaller number of things
very well the pressure is to do a lot of things.

Topic: New Contributor Experience
How would you characterize the experience new contributors have currently?
The mechanics of contributing (CLA, accounts, etc) could be much better. I
am not convinced that the CLA is providing value. The percentage of initial
contributions that I see that are more than trivial spelling fixes or
similar is low, as they need to focus on the process rather than the
content just to get going.

Topic: Communication
How would you describe our current state of communication in the OpenStack
community?
There are enough different communication channels available that it is hard
for anyone to monitor them all and still have time to write. I do think in
general we have done a good job of herding conversations toward the mailing
lists and logged IRC channels. Twitter and personal blogs are other common
avenues and may or may not be easy to discover if one doesn't already know
about them.

Topic: Relationship with the Foundation Board
The technical committee interacts with the foundation board on several
different fronts. How would you describe these interactions?
I have mostly seen the interaction around the DefCore work and have found
it interesting that neither side seems to want to say “This Is OpenStack”
for fear of stepping on toes.


dt

-- 

Dean Troyer
dtroyer at gmail.com
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