Open Stack

Some Monday morning pre-coffee thoughts

On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 10:15 PM, Tom Fifield <tom at openstack.org> wrote:

> So, my reading is we already have such governance established - but rather
> than being an individual, it is a committee - the user committee. We'll need
> to tweak it a bit I guess, but in fact it is already set up such that the TC
> _must_[1] listen to it ... for at least four hours per year ;)

That's definitely a front runner in my mind, cheers to all the hard
work the existing committee have done around surveys, the expanded
operations track and everything else.

I do think it's a bit confusingly named & that this stems from a
fundamental flaw in OpenStack community though, that there are two
parts of the community, "Developers" and "Users" and that "User" means
someone who deploys and maintains cloud infrastructure.

As I see it there's (at least) three major community segments, from
smallest to largest:

* Developer, who write the code
* Operators/Administrators/(pick your title), who build and maintain
production clouds
* Users who actually deploy applications on top of the cloud

Obviously many individuals and organizations fall into multiple
categories and within "Users" as writ above there's a variety of
constituencies that could be broken out.

In terms of Governance do the "User Committee" cover all that is not
dev?  That's really a huge amount of ground to cover and I do think
they've done a great job of it, especially on the ops side as
evidenced by this discussion, and I can see they're reaching out more
to the end users as well or starting to.

I'd be interested to hear what those who've been doing the job think
needs to be done to scale out and cover the whole constituency? More
member, more volunteer staff, sub-committees, distinct operators and
end user committees, or perhaps the existing structure is sufficient?

> Thoughts? What would you see this group doing?

I think the user surveys have been very valuable in seeing how
OpenStack is used in the wild, continuing that and refining the
questions so we can identify community priorities is a worthy goal and
an ongoing task that should definitely be continued.

Facilitating the organization of summit tracks & possible inter-summit
ops gatherings is another I think we have broad agreement on as that
seems to be happening.

Do we want to produce tangible best practices or example architectures
possibly by inviting in existing configuration management tools?  That
maybe a reach both in terms of our time availability and the interest
of the people who are doing that work now to come in under a new
umbrella.  If that, or something like that were our goal then a PTL
type structure would probably make more sense.

-Jon