Open Stack

I am announcing my candidacy for a position on the OpenStack Technical
Committee.

I am currently employed by HP to work 100% upstream on OpenStack. I
started contributing to OpenStack in 2012, not long after joining
Dreamhost. In the time since, I have worked on a wide variety of
projects within the community. I am one of the founding members of the
Ceilometer and unified command line projects. I am also part of the
team working on the Python 3 transition, and have contributed to
several of the infrastructure projects. I formally joined the Release
Management team at the start of Liberty, and have been working on
updating processes and tools to make releases easier for all project
teams. I will be PTL of the Release Management team for the Mitaka
cycle.  I served as PTL for the Oslo project for three terms, and I
have served on the Technical Committee for the last two years. In
addition to my technical contributions, I helped to found and still
help to organize the OpenStack meetup group in Atlanta, Georgia.

I characterize most of my recent work as enabling others in the
community. As Oslo PTL I helped the team complete its transition from
copy-and-paste sharing to true shared libraries by creating new
processes and tools. Ceilometer was one of the earliest projects to
need to interact with a significant number of the other projects at a
code level, and my experience on that team led me to establish the
Oslo liaison program when we recognized a similar need as adoption of
Oslo libraries expanded. That pattern has been reused by many of the
other cross-project teams to establish formal lines of communication
to address our community’s growth. The self-service release review
tools the release management and infrastructure teams are building now
are another effort to remove process bottlenecks by enabling project
teams to manage their own releases.

During my past terms on the TC, I worked to find compromise positions
and clarity, incorporating the views of other committee members while
tempering them with my own. Several times I wrote the first draft of
policy changes on contentious topics, moving abstract arguments to
discussions of concrete terms. This was especially true for the shift
from the incubation to “big tent” governance models late in 2014. I
prepared several alternate versions of the policy changes before an
approach was found that appealed to all committee members.  Iteration
for the win.

All of these experiences have given me a unique cross-project
perspective into OpenStack, and reinforced for me the importance of
communication between project teams to smooth out the integration
points and remove friction.  Improving communication and cross-project
efforts is a key role for the Technical Committee. For example, during
Mitaka I will be working to support the interoperability goals of the
community by ensuring the DefCore committee have and understand all of
the input from project contributors to set the right technical
direction, and that the contributors in turn understand the issues
raised from within the DefCore committee so we can add or modify
features to improve interoperability between OpenStack deployments.

The OpenStack community is the most exciting and welcoming group I
have interacted with in more than 20 years of contributing to open
source projects. I'm looking forward to continuing to being a part of
the community and serving the project.

Thank you,
Doug

Official Candidacy: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/227857/
Review history: https://review.openstack.org/#/q/reviewer:2472,n,z
Commit history: https://review.openstack.org/#/q/owner:2472,n,z
Stackalytics: http://stackalytics.com/?user_id=doug-hellmann
Foundation: http://www.openstack.org/community/members/profile/359
OpenHUB: https://www.openhub.net/accounts/doughellmann
Freenode: dhellmann
Website: https://doughellmann.com