Open Stack

Hello everyone,

I would like to put my name in for the TC election.

For those of you that don't know me, my name is Sean McGinnis and I have been
the Cinder PTL since the Mitaka release. I have been an operator, consumer,
and developer of infrastructure related services since the late 90's.

I think the role of the TC is more important now than ever. OpenStack is
evolving changing, and the decisions we make now will have a big impact on
where we are a year or more down the road. I would love to be a part of that
and provide my perspective to help shape these decisions.

I've been asked by several people over the last few months for my perspective
on some large companies pulling away from OpenStack or reallocating their
resources elsewhere. While this certainly has an impact on some of the things
we can accomplish, my opinion is that this is actually a good thing. For quite
a while we had some big names dropping a lot of money into the community, with
little return on that investment.

While the loss of some really amazing folks has certainly been felt across the
board, I think this is actually a good thing and something that needed to come
sooner or later. The hype has certainly moved on to other things, but I feel
OpenStack is probably more relevant and useful than ever. With our community
shrinking, this is forcing us to look at what we really need to focus on and
make sure we have a good solid core. I do believe that in the long run,
OpenStack will end up better after going through our current growing pains.

Related to that, I think we do need to start getting a little more opinionated
about some things in the interest of keeping things simple and focused. We
should make it clear what is a core part of OpenStack, and what is a part of
the broader ecosystem.

At the same time, we need to balance encouraging that ecosystem to grow and
thrive. It doesn't matter how well Cinder can create volumes and Nova can spin
up instances if it is too difficult to use build broader solutions on top of.

I'm also a big proponent of closing the loop between those using OpenStack and
those of us building it and setting its direction. I've made it a point to
attend the Operator Midcycles in order to increase this communication. Our
communication between users, operators, and devs is key in making sure we are
focusing those limited resources on addressing the features and issues with
the greatest impact.

Finally, I think education and documentation is a very important component to
all we do. Things like the Upstream University to help new developers get on
board and contributing will be a focus for me going forward. And it doesn't
matter how good of features we implement, if there is no documentation or other
means of educating users about them and how to use them.

So my main thoughts could probably be distilled to:

* Keep things simple as much as possible
* Encourage expansion and interoperability to a wider ecosystem
* Increase communication across all aspects of the community
* Spread knowledge wherever possible

I think mostly we are on the right track for all of these, and I would love to
be part of the TC to be another voice to encourage and direct where we go.

Thank you for considering me for this role!

Sean McGinnis (smcginnis)