Open Stack

I would like to propose my candidacy for the OpenStack Technical Committee.

I have been involved with OpenStack since we started the Heat project in 
early 2012. I'm still a member of the Heat Core team and - according to 
the semi-official statistics from Bitergia 
(http://bitergia.com/public/reports/openstack/2013_04_grizzly/), at 
least - among the more prolific patch contributors to OpenStack.

Over the last year I have often worked closely with the TC, beginning 
with helping to shepherd Heat through the incubation process. That 
process involved developing a consensus on the scope of the OpenStack 
project as a whole, and new procedures and definitions for incubating 
projects in OpenStack. These changes paved the way for projects like 
Trove, Marconi and Savanna to be incubated. I hope and expect that more 
projects will continue to follow in these footsteps.

I remain a reasonably frequent, if irregular, attendee at TC meetings - 
occasionally as a proxy for the Heat PTL, but more often just because I 
feel I can contribute. At this stage of its evolution, I think the main 
responsibility of the TC is to grow the OpenStack project in a 
responsible, sustainable way, so I take particular interest in 
discussions around incubation and graduation of new projects. Many new 
projects also have potential integration points with Heat, so having 
folks from the Heat core team involved seems valuable.

I also think that the TC could do more to communicate its inner workings 
(which are public but, I suspect, not widely read). While most decisions 
eventually come down to a vote and the results are reported, the most 
important work of the committee is not in voting but in building 
consensus. I believe the community would benefit from more insight into 
that process, and to that end I have started blogging about important 
decisions of the TC - not only the outcomes, but the reasons behind them 
and the issues that were considered along the way:

http://www.zerobanana.com/archive/2013/09/25#savanna-incubation
http://www.zerobanana.com/archive/2013/09/04#icehouse-incubation
http://www.zerobanana.com/archive/2013/08/07#non-relational-trove

These posts appear on Planet OpenStack and are regularly featured in the 
Community Newsletter, so I like to think that this is helping to bring 
the workings of the TC in front of an audience who might not otherwise 
be aware of them.

If elected, I'd like to act as an informal point of contact for projects 
that are already in incubation or are considering it, to help explain 
the incubation process and the committee's expectations around it.

I consider myself fortunate that my employer permits me to spend 
substantially all of my time on OpenStack, and that my colleagues and I 
have a clear mandate to do what we consider best for the _entire_ 
OpenStack community, because we know that we succeed only when everyone 
succeeds.

cheers,
Zane.