Open Stack

Despite its name, the Technical Committee has become the part of the
OpenStack contributor community that enshrines, defines, and -- in some
rare cases -- enforces what it means to be "OpenStack". Meanwhile,
the community has seen a great deal of growth and change.

Some of these changes have led to progress and clarity, others have left
people confused about how they can best make a contribution and what
constraints their contributions must meet (for example, do we all know
what it means to be an "official" project?).

Much of the confusion, I think, can be traced to two things:

* Information is not always clear nor clearly available, despite
   valiant efforts to maintain a transparent environment for the
   discussion of policy and process. There is more that can be done
   to improve engagement and communication. Maybe the TC needs
   release notes?

* Agreements are made without the full meaning and implications of those
   agreements being collectively shared. Most involved think they agree,
   but there is limited shared understanding, so there is limited
   effective collaboration. We see this, for example, in the ongoing
   discussions on "What is OpenStack?". Agreement is claimed without
   actually existing.

We can fix this, but we need a TC that has a diversity of ideas and
experiences. Other candidates will have dramatically different opinions
from me. This is good because we must rigorously and vigorously question
the status quo and our assumptions. Not to tear things down, but to
ensure our ideas are based on present day truths and clear visions of
the future. And we must do this, always, where it can be seen and
joined and later discovered; gerrit and IRC are not enough.

To have legitimate representation on the Technical Committee we must
have voices that bring new ideas, are well informed about history, that
protect the needs of existing users and developers, encourage new users
and developers, that want to know how, that want to know why. No single
person can speak with all these voices.

Several people have encouraged me to run for the TC, wanting my
willingness to ask questions, to challenge the status quo and to drive
discourse. What I want is to use my voice to bring about frequent and
positive reevaluation.

We have a lot of challenges ahead. We want to remain a pleasant,
progressive and relevant place to participate. That will require
discovering ways to build bridges with other communities and within our
own. We need to make greater use of technologies which were not invented
here and be more willing to think about the future users, developers and
use cases we don't yet have (as there will always be more of those). We
need to keep looking and pushing forward.

To that end I'm nominating myself to be a member of the Technical
Committee.

If you have specific questions about my goals, my background or anything
else, please feel free to ask. I'm on IRC as cdent or send some email.
Thank you for your consideration.

-- 
Chris Dent               ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ)        https://anticdent.org/
freenode: cdent                                         tw: @anticdent