Open Stack

Hi everyone,

The election process to renew 6 of our Technical Committee members was
started[1], with the self-nomination period running this week.

Information on what the Technical Committee is and what it does is
generally available on the governance website[2]. However you may wonder
what the current Technical Committee membership achieved (to this day)
since its election in May. If so, read on!

During that period the TC made a number of decisions and passed a number
of resolutions to shape the future of OpenStack.

One of them is the publication of a top "help wanted" list to more
clearly communicate where our community is struggling and where extra
contributions can really make a difference. That list is now published
with entries for "doc owners", "infra sysadmins", and "Glance
contributors" (and more coming up).

Another area is adapting to changes in our ecosystem: we added etcd as
an OpenStack base service to encourage all projects to take advantage of
etcd for coordination. We also passed guidelines for managing releases
of binary artifacts, which can be applied to Go executables or Docker
images.

We evolved our project team list, removing Fuel and more recently adding
Blazar and Cyborg.

Other policies and clarifications adopted by the current membership
included a clarification about the current state of PostgreSQL in
OpenStack, a description of what upstream supports means, the addition
of a "assert:supports-api-interoperability" tag, and selecting community
goals for the Queens release cycle.

But perhaps the work the most relevant for the long term was the
publication of the TC 2019 vision, painting a picture of a desirable
future for the Technical Committee and by extension for the OpenStack
community.

One of the areas defined in this vision was to achieve better community
diversity and inclusivity. To achieve geographical diversity (and in
particular better tap into the potential contributors in China) we need
to be less reliant on regular synchronous team meetings on IRC. The TC
decided to lead by example there and drop its traditional reliance on
weekly meetings to make progress. Most of the work is now done
asynchronously, and we transitioned our IRC public presence to "office
hours" in various timezones in a dedicated channel (#openstack-tc). We
also passed resolutions to stop *requiring* IRC meetings for project
teams (and allow them to host meetings in any logged IRC channel).
Community diversity is also about engaging people coming from an
OpenStack operator background to be more directly involved with upstream
development. TC and UC members collaborated to create a new form of
workgroups (called SIGs) that should help in eliminating artificial
barriers to contribution and organize everyone around common topics of
interest.

Another area in the vision is how we engage with adjacent communities.
Members of the TC are actively engaged in reaching out and sharing
experiences, in particular with the Kubernetes and the Ansible communities.

But there are areas in the vision where the TC needs to make progress in
the near future, in particular the definition of "constellations", and
growing the next generation of OpenStack leaders. If you're interested
in helping, please throw your name in the hat ! The Technical Committee
is just a bunch of humans interested in the welfare of OpenStack as a
whole. The activity of the TC also doesn't stop with elected members:
you can help, draft, propose, and discuss changes without being formally
elected. Join us on #openstack-tc !

[1]
http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2017-October/122942.html
[2] https://governance.openstack.org/tc/

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)
Chair, OpenStack Technical Committee