At the informal OpenInfra Governing Board get-together in France immediately before the Summit, directors talked about how they might "drive projects to the next level." In a follow-up thread on the public board mailing listi[*], Julia posited:

If we perform a risk assessment ourselves, what social and technical aspects would come to mind? How can we move those items forward?

This was delegated to the foundation staff, whose executive management chose it as one of our three goals[**] for 2026: "Elevate OpenInfra projects to their next level" To this end, community managers and other staff have collaborated to draft areas of focus for ourselves with associated success measurements relevant to each OpenInfra Project. In the case of OpenStack, this is what we came up with: "Lowering the barriers to participate in OpenStack through clear and visible avenues and forums to get involved and collaborate, increased reviewer bandwidth and efficiency, and simplified user survey." The idea is that the foundation staff, through a multi-pronged approach, can coordinate a number of initiatives we've got underway for the year such as closer collaboration between operator-oriented groups and SIGs, continuation of the Bridging the Gap effort, planned improvements to www.openstack.org content, and giving the User Survey a much needed tune-up. Efficacy will be determined in various ways including impact on code review response times, sharing/adoption of more efficient communication behaviors across teams, cross-pollination in operator activities, increased feedback from surveys, and more effective reliance on relevant sections of the website. I'm bringing this draft plan to the mailing list to solicit community feedback, in preparation for an upcoming presentation to the board of directors. Keep in mind that the point of this exercise is to better use my time and the time of my colleagues on the staff of the OpenInfra Foundation in service of OpenStack, not to make more work for leaders and project maintainers nor to set technical direction as that's not our place. I just want to make sure that this plan is sensible and doesn't conflict with community expectations, while putting our limited resources into the right activities. If anyone has concerns or improvements to suggest please feel free to follow up in this thread or voice them to me directly (ideally over the coming week), or to your representatives on the OpenInfra Governing Board (who will be the ones to ultimately approve what we come up with). As always, thanks for everything you do in the name of OpenStack! [*] https://lists.openinfra.org/archives/list/foundation-board@lists.openinfra.o... [**] https://lists.openinfra.org/archives/list/foundation@lists.openinfra.org/thr... -- Jeremy Stanley