Open Stack

I'd like to throw in my hat to serve the community as a TC member.

My name is Jim Rollenhagen, but I'm better known in the community as jroll.
I've worked in many environments, from 20-person startup to massive
corporations. For the past three years, I've been working on OpenStack at
Rackspace. I primarily work on ironic (where I just started my third term as
PTL), but also dabble heavily in Nova, and try to contribute to cross-project
teams (mostly infra, QA, and Oslo) when I can.

I believe the primary objective of the TC should be to serve the community.
There's a few things we can immediately do to improve. First is the ongoing
effort to document principles and expectations. There's a massive amount of
shared understanding among the leaders in our community (and especially the
current TC) that isn't necessarily known or shared by the rest of the
community. We need to write down the current state of that. The principles
document does this well; but that's only the start. We need to continue to
document expectations for projects in the big tent, expectations for PTLs and
liaisons, and where we want OpenStack to be long term. We often focus on the
short term without thinking about how things support our longer-term goals, and
I'd like to fix that by writing down our vision for the future.

Over the last year, folks keep talking about the big tent, and how it has
watered down the meaning or focus of OpenStack. This is true today, at some
level. However, I believe this is short-term pain while we are moving to a
better place. I don't believe the solution is to go back to the old way of
life. Rather, we should roll forward and help to make the big tent better.
Going back will only create more confusion, and will bring the TC back to the
days of evaluating the usefulness and technical excellence of projects - which
we already have found is untenable. We have common ways of doing many things,
but those aren't well-documented and so newer projects simply do things the way
they think is best, or fastest, or the way it's done in the first project they
look to source ideas from. For example, I know of at least two or three ways
that microversioning is implemented.  There are two ways projects are
implementing rolling upgrades. And that might be okay; but they need to be
documented somewhere that all projects can benefit from. We should even go
further, and build frameworks for common things like these that OpenStack
projects tend to value. I believe the TC (working with folks like the
architecture WG, etc) could (and should!) be the body to help implement and
drive this sort of work. The new goals process is one step toward this, and I
think it's a great start. If we can truly make the big tent a more coherent set
of projects, I think it will be a huge win for everyone - not just developers
that need a home for their project.

The ironic project went through incubation just before the big tent went into
effect, and as such was one of the first projects to need to work with some of
the constraints (i.e., not be a first-class member of many of the cross-project
teams). We've implemented devstack and tempest plugins, in-tree API reference,
and in-tree install guide. To accomplish some of these, we needed to contribute
both code and documentation into these projects. I think my experience there
helps me relate to newer big tent projects that struggle with some of these
initiatives. I look forward to leading efforts to make this less of a burden on
projects.

I would be honored to serve the community from a TC seat, if elected. Whether
or not I am elected, I hope to work on some or all of these items over the next
two cycles, but I believe I will be in a better position to get these done from
within the TC.


// jim