Open Stack

I am announcing my candidacy for a position on the OpenStack Technical
Committee.

I have served on the Technical Committee for the last three years and
as PTL of the Release Management team for the Mitaka and Newton
cycles.  I will be PTL for the Release Management team again for
Ocata.

Before the Newton cycle I worked on a wide variety of projects within
the community, including Ceilometer, and python-openstackclient. I am
an Oslo team member, and served as PTL for the Icehouse, Juno, and
Kilo cycles.  I am also part of the team working on the Python 3
transition, and have contributed to several of the infrastructure
projects. In addition to my technical contributions, I helped to found
and still help to organize the OpenStack meetup group in Atlanta,
Georgia.

I started contributing to OpenStack in 2012, not long after joining
Dreamhost, and I am currently employed by Red Hat to work on OpenStack
with a focus on long-term project concerns.

Most of my work on OpenStack has been focused on enabling others in
the community. From the Oslo library hierarchy, to establishing the
team liaison system, to reno, to release automation, I have worked on
tools, processes, and patterns to make incremental improvements in our
ability to build OpenStack. I view serving on the TC as an extension
of that work.

My experience has led me to develop a perspective of OpenStack that is
strongly focused on cross-project concerns, and to reinforce for me
the importance of communication between project teams to smooth out
the integration points and remove friction, all key responsibilities
of the Technical Committee.

During Ocata we will be working on the first iteration of the new
community-wide goals process [1], defined during Newton. This
initiative is intended to increase the visibility of important
community-wide needs and encourage project teams to incorporate them
into their priority discussions. We have bootstrapped the process by
identifying several potential goals related to lowering technical
debt, one of which was approved for Ocata as a trial run [2].  I would
like to continue to serve on the TC to finish launching this new
initiative because this is the first time we have attempted anything
like this, and I expect us to find issues with the process and to need
to adjust it to incorporate feedback.

Having the TC identify community goals is an important step for us to
take.  It relies on a view that OpenStack *is* one community, with
shared values and a commitment to collaborate. This view is not
universally held among all of our contributors, and I find that
unfortunate. I believe that shared values, collaboration, and
consistency are compatible with innovation, experimentation, and
finding creative solutions to challenging problems. The diversity of
the projects that already exist in our big tent shows this to be true.

The fact that we are still debating the extent of our unity tells me
that it is important to document our community principles. As we have
grown, new community members have joined with an incomplete
understanding of our history. Even some folks who have been around for
a long time do not have the whole picture, or disagree with decisions
made early on.  We have started writing down some of the assumptions
we have in mind when we discuss topics within the TC [3], in order to
come to a shared understanding of where we all (not just TC members)
think we want to be going and how to get there. Without that shared
understanding for context, some of the TC's decisions may seem to not
make sense, which also means we are doing a poor job of communicating
outside of the TC with the rest of the community. I would like to
continue to serve on the TC as we work on those communication issues
and resolve the questions about our shared principles.

The OpenStack community is the most exciting and welcoming group I
have interacted with in more than 20 years of contributing to open
source projects. I look forward to continuing to be a part of the
community and serving the project.

Thank you,
Doug

Review history: https://review.openstack.org/#/q/reviewer:2472,n,z
Commit history: https://review.openstack.org/#/q/owner:2472,n,z
Stackalytics: http://stackalytics.com/?user_id=doug-hellmann
Foundation Profile: http://www.openstack.org/community/members/profile/359
Freenode: dhellmann
Website: https://doughellmann.com

[1] http://governance.openstack.org/goals/index.html
[2] http://governance.openstack.org/goals/ocata/remove-incubated-oslo-code.html
[3] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/357260/