Open Stack

confirmed

On 07/10/14 04:21 PM, Russell Bryant wrote:
> Hello, everyone!
> 
> I would like to run for re-election on the Technical Committee. I have
> been an elected member of the TC since it was created in the Fall of
> 2012 [1]. I have been contributing to OpenStack since late 2011 (commits
> [2] reviews [3]). My most substantial contributions have been to Nova,
> where I also served as the PTL for the Havana and Icehouse releases. For
> further details on my background, see openhub [4] or linkedin [5].
> 
> I have been a proactive member of the TC.  I take my broad experience
> with the project and work to turn it into change that puts us in a
> better position for the future.  Some specific examples of actions I’ve
> taken may help demonstrate this.
> 
> Over the last cycle it became clear that the TC could do a better job at
> communicating what we’re up to to the broader community.  I helped
> launch an ongoing effort to blog about TC activities.  I wrote the first
> [9] and third [10] posts of this series. We now intend to rotate the
> authorship of these posts through a group of willing TC members.
> 
> I’ve become deeply familiar with the history of Neutron vs. nova-network
> through my work with the Nova project.  During my second term as the
> Nova PTL, we unfortunately reached a point where we had to unfreeze
> development on nova-network [11].  I wanted to find ways to help improve
> the current situation and help prevent it from happening again.  I
> identified policy that could be added (must have explicit deprecation
> and migration plan in place before graduation) [12] for the future.  To
> help with the current situation, I proposed that we kick off a round of
> project reviews where we review all existing projects against our
> incubation and graduation requirements [13].  This process resulted in a
> gap analysis and plans for filling those gaps for Neutron [14], Trove,
> Ceilometer, Horizon, Glance, and Heat.  We are now much closer to being
> able to deprecate nova-network than we were 6 months ago thanks to some
> very hard work by the Neutron team.  I think these reviews were very
> productive and I hope to help continue this process with the TC going
> forward.
> 
> The TC has the critical role to evolve and scale our structure and
> processes to ensure the ongoing health of our development community.
> We’ve worked through important changes in every cycle so far.  From
> recent discussions it is quite clear that it is time for another round
> of big changes to how we organize our teams and projects. The TC itself
> has even become a bottleneck in some cases.  I see resolving these
> issues as a top priority for the TC over the next release cycle.
> 
> There are far too many things wrapped up in the incubation and
> integration statuses.  They communicate different things to different
> audiences.  This overload has led to a lot of conflict.  It’s a high
> priority for me to ensure that with whatever changes we make, we value
> an inclusive community that lets projects doing good work be a part of
> OpenStack.  We need to rework the organization such that what we’re
> communicating is the most useful information for each audience.  At the
> same time, we need allow this growth in such a way that it doesn’t
> provide unbearable strain on horizontal project resources like
> documentation, infrastructure, or release management.  The incubated and
> integrated statuses are not doing the job, but I’m confident that we can
> work through our next evolution, and I would like to be a part of
> ensuring that happens.
> 
> Thank you all for your consideration. It’s an honor and a pleasure to
> work with you. If there’s anything you would like to discuss, please
> feel free to reach out to me.
> 
> 
> Below you will find my answers to the provided questions [6].
> 
> *** Topic: OpenStack Mission
> 
> How do you feel the technical community is doing in meeting the
> OpenStack Mission?
> 
> To recap, the mission statement is “to produce the ubiquitous Open
> Source Cloud Computing platform that will meet the needs of public and
> private clouds regardless of size, by being simple to implement and
> massively scalable.”
> 
> “ubiquitous” - I think the part we’re doing great here.  OpenStack is
> growing like crazy and is being used all over the place.  The list of
> supporting companies [7] is impressive.  The number and diversity of our
> contributors is even more impressive.  With that said, we shouldn’t get
> comfortable.  There is a lot more to go.
> 
> “public and private clouds” - I think we do a nice job working to
> support both of these use cases.
> 
> “regardless of size”, “massively scalable” - This one probably depends
> on who you ask.  :-)  Our scalability depends on the project.  In some
> areas we’re doing great.  In all areas, we have more improvements to
> make.  I think our biggest failure here has been how well we communicate
> what to expect to the rest of the community.  Some people expect that
> they can take every component of the integrated release to large public
> cloud scale.  That isn’t true and we’ve done a poor job of setting
> expectations here.  This is something I’d like to improve on.
> 
> “simple to implement” - I think OpenStack is far from simple.  It’s also
> a large scale distributed system that is very incredibly flexible so it
> can support a large number of different use cases.  So, we should set
> expectations accordingly.  However, I still think there is a ton of room
> for usability improvements.
> 
> *** Topic: Technical Committee Mission
> 
> How do you feel the technical committee is doing in meeting the
> technical committee mission?
> 
> The TC mission statement can be found in the governance repository [8].
>  The current version is: “The Technical Committee ("TC") is tasked with
> providing the technical leadership for OpenStack as a whole (all
> official programs, as defined below). It enforces OpenStack ideals
> (Openness, Transparency, Commonality, Integration, Quality...), decides
> on issues affecting multiple programs, forms an ultimate appeals board
> for technical decisions, and generally has oversight over all the
> OpenStack project.”
> 
> The TC is only two years old.  If you look through our history, I think
> the TC has done a nice job evolving processes and structure as OpenStack
> has grown.  The next evolution of process and structure has been the
> most dominant area of discussion lately.  I am very optimistic that we
> can resolve those issues.
> 
> The ways that we could improve our technical leadership have received a
> bit less discussion.  As OpenStack grows into more and more projects, I
> feel that leadership around standardization becomes more and more
> important.  I’d like to see the TC bootstrap an effort around APIs to
> help improve our consistency and overall quality.  We are also
> discussing having a cross-project specs repository.  It makes sense for
> the TC to own this to help provide more structure to development efforts
> that affect many projects.
> 
> *** Topic: Contributor Motivation
> 
> How would you characterize the various facets of contributor motivation?
> 
> People want to do work that matters and enjoy doing it.  OpenStack is
> clearly a project making a huge impact.  We also need to make sure it’s
> a pleasant community to participate in.  There are a lot of things that
> make some communities more enjoyable than others.  There are obvious
> things we want to avoid that are covered by the community code of
> conduct [15].  I think feeling non-productive hurts motivation.  We need
> to keep working to identify and resolve issues that get in the way of
> getting work done.
> 
> *** Topic: Rate of Growth
> 
> There is no argument the OpenStack technical community has a substantial
> rate of growth. What are some of the consequences of this rate?
> 
> Just like any organization with growth, we have growing pains.  I’d say
> identifying and working on these growing pains has always been a core
> part of what the TC does.  I expect that to continue to be the case.
> The coming cycle appears to be no different.
> 
> *** Topic: New Contributor Experience
> 
> How would you characterize the experience new contributors have currently?
> 
> I suspect being a new contributor would be quite overwhelming.  Joining
> a project of this size and activity level is daunting for several
> reasons.  I welcome and applaud all efforts to help onboard new
> contributors.
> 
> *** Topic: Communication
> 
> How would you describe our current state of communication in the
> OpenStack community?
> 
> The way we communicate seems pretty typical for most open source
> communities.  We have a heavy emphasis on mailing lists and IRC.  We
> have a significant amount of in person meetups as well.  For those that
> are able to make it, I think they help.  We just need to continue to be
> sensitive to community members that can’t attend all events.  Good
> documentation of discussions and allowing discussions to continue on the
> mailing list are important. This is largely done well already, but it’s
> important that we continue to emphasize it.
> 
> *** Topic: Relationship with the Foundation Board
> 
> The technical committee interacts with the foundation board on several
> different fronts. How would you describe these interactions?
> 
> Our interaction has been improving.  We’ve started holding joint
> meetings at the OpenStack summit.  There has also been quite a bit of
> interaction on the DefCore topic specifically throughout the development
> cycle.  I look forward to continuing to collaborate with the board on
> the topics where it makes sense.
> 
> 
> [1] http://ttx.re/history-of-openstack-governance.html
> [2]
> http://stackalytics.com/?user_id=russellb&release=all&project_type=all&metric=commits
> [3]
> http://stackalytics.com/?user_id=russellb&release=all&project_type=all&metric=marks
> [4] https://www.openhub.net/accounts/russellb
> [5] https://www.linkedin.com/in/russellbryant
> [6]
> https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/TC_Elections_October_2014#TC_Election_Questions
> [7] http://www.openstack.org/foundation/companies/
> [8]
> http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/governance/tree/reference/charter.rst
> [9]
> http://www.openstack.org/blog/2014/06/openstack-technical-committee-update/
> [10]
> http://www.openstack.org/blog/2014/07/openstack-technical-committee-update-july-1/
> [11]
> http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-January/025824.html
> [12] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/70389/
> [13]
> http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-February/026450.html
> [14]
> https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Governance/TechnicalCommittee/Neutron_Gap_Coverage
> [15] http://www.openstack.org/legal/community-code-of-conduct/
> 


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