Open Stack

I would like to announce my candidacy for the OpenStack Technical Committee

Many of you many not know me, because I am not a very active contributor.

First a bit about myself. I am a Platform Architect working for Cisco in 
Israel and have been involved with OpenStack for the past two years. I 
was and (and still am a very active member of the virtualization 
community [1] and have been for a good number of years.

I was honored to contribute and participate in the OpenStack 
Architecture Design Guide [2]. I am not new to writing but this was a 
new experience for me. One that I thoroughly enjoyed and would love to 
do again, if presented with the opportunity.

These are the following reasons I think I can make a difference as part 
of the TC

#1 Diversity

The vast majority of the TC members are all long standing and well known 
members of the OpenStack community. Many of them have been 
core-developers, PTL's, reviewers. All of them have one thing in common 
they are developers and people who take pride and joy in contributing 
code to the OpenStack projects.

I too have contributed code to the OpenStack projects - but not on the 
scale that any of the other candidates have. nowhere near close.
And I am not ashamed of that fact.
I am not a developer. Yes, I dabble in code (not as much as I would 
like), but I am deep down in my heart, an Operations guy.  I like to get 
things to work, but not only that they work, but that they are stable, 
robust, and will provide a sound infrastructure (so that I do not get 
paged at 03.00 every night because something fell over and died).
When all of the members of a committee are from a single 'stream' then 
it is natural to look at things in a certain way. But that is not the 
only way to look at things, there are other perspectives that need to be 
considered and that perspective (in my humble opinion) is missing.


#2 Focus

There has been a lengthy discussion over the past few months about what 
OpenStack is and what it is not. What should be part of OpenStack and 
again what should not. I cannot say that I fully agree with all the 
decisions that have been made, although I do fully agree with the 
direction in which OpenStack is going and how the TC has been driving that.

I feel that the as part of the TC I will help the community focus on 
building a tightly integrated suite of software (there is no way you can 
call OpenStack a product) that will work, and work well [3].


#3 Acceptance of others

It is no secret that i think that I have spoken my mind[4], more than 
once on how I find it extremely hard for someone who is not a developer 
to help and make OpenStack better. I have tried to lower that hurdle in 
a number of ways [5] to make it easier for 'non-dev's' to starting 
'chipping in'. But it seems that I was not successful. Even with regards 
to myself.

We are all members of the community. But there are several levels. Even 
in this election only ''Individual Members who committed a change to a 
repository under ’any’ of the official OpenStack Project Teams (as 
defined above) over the last two 6-month release cycles are 
automatically considered ATC'' and they are the only ones that can vote.

There are other ways to contribute.
People that report bugs contribute.
People that write blog posts contribute.
People that evangelize in User groups and speak at conferences, meetings 
etc. - they also contribute.

It is not all about code.
Yes it is hard to quantify. Yes it is hard to measure. But that does not 
mean it should not be considered.

If elected to serve as part of the TC - this is something I would like 
pursue - something that can make the OpenStack community not only a 
developer community - but a community of all those who care about it.

I would like to leave you with one last thought.
I thought long and hard about putting up myself as a candidate. I do 
think that I have a fresh perspective to bring to the table, a different 
way of looking at things and a lot of passion that can help OpenStack 
achieve what it set out to do.

``Our goal is to produce the ubiquitous Open Source cloud computing 
platform that will meet the needs of public and private cloud providers 
regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively scalable.``

I would like to wish all the candidates the best of luck.

-- 
Best Regards, Maish Saidel-Keesing


[1] http://vsphere-land.com/news/top-vblog-2015-full-results.html
[2] 
http://technodrone.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-openstack-architecture-design-guide.html
[3] 
http://technodrone.blogspot.com/2014/08/to-innovate-or-to-stabilize-that-is.html
[4] 
http://technodrone.blogspot.com/2014/09/an-open-letter-to-openstack-foundation.html
[5] 
http://technodrone.blogspot.com/2014/11/start-contributing-to-openstack-easy.html