Hi everyone,
Back in 2016-2017, TC members participated in stewardship training at Zingerman's. Part of their framework relies on the concept of "visioning": how describing in details a desirable future helps you get there.
As a result of that training, TC members in 2017 created such a "vision"[1], set in 2019. As the sole TC survivor of these ancient times and as we close the 2019 year, it sounds appropriate to reflect back on this exercise and discuss if anything more should be done in that area.
[1] https://governance.openstack.org/tc/resolutions/20170404-vision-2019.html
The first part of the vision, "Navigating with Constellations", was describing efforts to make OpenStack components combinations more easy to understand for specific use cases, and individual components more easily reusable in other types of deployments.
The "constellation" concept never really took off, and product management is still very much done downstream of OpenStack. The "vision for OpenStack Clouds" living document[2] helped us refine our scope and better answer the "What is OpenStack" question. The OpenStack Map[3] helps navigate the ecosystem, and content on the software pages on openstack.org is now more directly driven[4] from the project teams, but overall making OpenStack easier to navigate is still very much a work in progress. That said, individual components are now generally easier to reuse in other contexts, as seen with Ironic reuse in Metal³.
The second part of the vision, "Working with Adjacent Communities", was describing how we should interact and combine our work with components produced by adjacent communities, rather than beginning and ending with OpenStack.
While the specific outcomes mentioned in the vision never happened, several efforts resulted in OpenStack having a more definite scope and place in the general technology landscape. Success of Kubernetes as an interoperable application deployment API helped position OpenStack more as an infrastructure provider. Our technical and non-technical experience was shared with adjacent communities like the cloud-native communities, but also with new open infrastructure projects under the OSF.
The third part, "Embracing Community Diversity", is probably where we've seen the less progress in the last 3 years. It describes efforts to get a more diverse contributor base and TC representation. I feel like we still have a long way to go in that area, although things are gradually improving: we have seen more and more users of OpenStack step up and lead project teams, we are also seeing people with more of an operator background be elected to the TC, and this year the TC saw its first APAC-based member.
The last part of the vision, "Growing New Leaders" describes facilitating inter-project work. Several initiatives have been put in place in that area since 2017. Community goals[5], SIGs[6], and more recently pop-up teams[7] (a concept which was described in the vision) all try to facilitate forming cross-disciplinary groups to advance complex inter-project issues in OpenStack.
In summary, little of the specific plans described in the vision have actually been put in place, and the topics mentioned in there are all still work in progress. That said, the vision was a useful exercise in that it defined areas of focus for the TC stewardship of the community, and it did definitely inspire several of the plans we put in place those last 3 years. It was a time-consuming exercise though, so I'm not sure we should go through that exercise again and painting a vision for 2023.
Comments, thoughts?
[2] https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/technical-vision.html [3] http://www.openstack.org/openstack-map [4] https://opendev.org/osf/openstack-map/ [5] https://governance.openstack.org/tc/goals/index.html [6] https://governance.openstack.org/sigs/ [7] https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/popup-teams.html