Open Stack

(This was also submitted as https://review.openstack.org/#/c/298294)

Hi everyone,

I'd like to submit my candidacy for reelection on the Technical 
Committee. For those who don't know me yet, my name is Thierry Carrez, I 
use "ttx" as my IRC nickname. I'm currently employed by the OpenStack 
Foundation as its Director of Engineering, which basically means I'm 
running the team in charge of ensuring the long-term health of the 
upstream OpenStack open source project and its governance. Handling the 
Technical Committee is my primary activity: 6 months ago I left the PTL 
role for the Release Management Team in order to be able to focus as 
much as possible on the TC.

One year ago I ran for election with the goal of having the TC "step out 
of the way"[1]. The idea was to remove the TC from the critical path of 
getting things done, and encourage a "ask for forgiveness, rather than 
permission" attitude in our community. I like to think we were 
successful at this. Project teams can now more easily add git 
repositories as they need them, they also end up asserting some tags by 
themselves, and the TC has generally moved to being an appeals board in 
case of disputes, rather than a procedural barrier in getting things done.

Here are the three priorities for my upcoming mandate, if the electorate
chooses to reelect me to the TC:

1/ Cleaning up the big tent

The transition to the "big tent" governance model is now finished, with 
all the expected projects now officially part of the OpenStack 
community. The big tent is all about community: answering the "are you 
one of us" question. Our approach there was to be inclusive and assume 
good faith, especially as we caught up on documenting what we meant by 
"the OpenStack Way". Over the past year we created the Project Team 
Guide[2], which clearly explains what is expected of official project 
teams. I think it's time for us to look back at all those projects we 
have in the tent, reach out to those who are lacking, and not hesitate 
to remove the ones that are not following our common community practices 
from the list of official project teams. Demoting a project used to be 
particularly painful, with costly git repository renames crating 
disruption on the demoted projects. But now that all projects hosted 
under our infrastructure (official and unofficial) use the same 
namespace, this cost and disruption are very limited, so cleaning up the 
big tent is now possible.

2/ Defining the limits of the big tent

The TC recently had two project team applications for which we had no 
good answer: Poppy and Tacker. Those resulted in close (and somewhat 
arbitrary) votes as each TC member tried to interpret the mission 
statement words and what we stand for. In the case of Poppy, there was 
the question of whether a service that proxies to non-OpenStack 
commercial services could be considered part of "OpenStack", without an 
open source reference implementation to do end-to-end testing against. 
In the case of Tacker, there was the question of a service standing on 
top of other OpenStack services to present a domain-specific API 
tailored to a specific use case or industry. Should that still be 
"OpenStack", or just something that consumes OpenStack ? I'd like the TC 
to take a step back and explore those two questions, without the 
pressure of a specific project team addition. Clarifying the rules may 
result in some official projects to be demoted to "unofficial" status as 
they would not fit the rules anymore.

3/ Launching the new separated event for project team members

We recently started the discussion[3] on splitting the "design summit" 
into wider community feedback / requirements-gathering sessions (that 
would happen at the main Summit) and a specific event for project team 
members to gather in a co-located venue to come up with a plan and 
organize its execution. We still have a long way to go (and not that 
much time) to discuss the format and the timing of this new event, and I 
expect the Newton membership of the TC to help with taking quick 
decisions there. The next step here will be a cross-project workshop at 
the Design Summit in Austin to discuss the current plan and go deeper in 
the details.

Those are my three priorities for Newton and Ocata, and this is what 
I'll push the Technical Committee towards if I'm elected.

Thank you all for your consideration !

[1] http://ttx.re/stepping-out-of-the-way.html
[2] http://docs.openstack.org/project-team-guide/
[3] http://ttx.re/splitting-out-design-summit.html

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)