Open Stack

Hi Everyone,

I'd like to submit my candidacy for another term on the OpenStack Technical
Committee.

In my candidacy platform last year I outlined that if elected to the TC I wanted
to bring more technical oversight to the TC, and also to work on improving the
messaging around OpenStack, to make it clearer. I think in the past year we've
made lots of progress on both fronts, but there is still more work to do. Over
the next year I'd like to see the TC continue to make progress on both fronts.

The introduction of community wide goals was a good start in having the TC
setting a more concrete technical direction for projects. I see a lot of
potential with it and am eager to see it grow it over time. It was also just a
start and long term I'd like to see the TC take on more difficult technical
discussions and making decisions. For example, the recent discussion about
being opinionated about our RDBMS is an example of the kind of discussions I'd
like to see the TC have more of in the future.

For making the messaging around OpenStack clearer I think we've also been
making improvements. Over the last year, we've added and improved a few tags,
added the OpenStack principles document, and more recently we've worked on a TC
vision for the next 2 years. Over the past year we've also started taking
a more aggressive stance towards removing projects. Moving into the future I'd
like to see more progress on clearly documenting what OpenStack is and how it
can be used. I'm optimistic some of the efforts we're working on will continue
to make this better over time.

For the next year in addition to continuing progress on the items I outlined
before the other priority I see for the TC is working on improving the health
of the contributor base in the community. It's no secret that there has been
a recent contraction in the community and a lot of long time contributors and
community leaders are no longer actively contributing. I think we need to take
more proactive steps about this if we want OpenStack to continue to thrive.

I think there are 2 key areas we'll need to address on this front. The first
is I'd like to see the TC taking a more hands on approach for both building up
the mentorship pipeline to enable growing the contributor base and leadership in
the community. Most of of existing efforts in this area tend to be concentrated
on on-boarding new contributors which is good, but there isn't anything to
help bridge the gap into becoming a community leader. This is somewhere I can
see the TC taking a more active role to help people work towards taking
on leadership roles in the community.

The other aspect is I think we need to working towards making our community
more accessible for casual and/or part time contributors. Right now our
community process for contribution is heavily weighted towards full time and
corporate sponsored contribution. Over the next year I'd like to work towards
easing this burden and growing the number of casual and/or independent
contributors.

I think this will take 2 forms, the first is decreasing the barrier to entry on
our tooling. Things like the CLA and the multi-step process involving creating
multiple account just to get access to pushing proposed changes is very
off-putting, especially if you're not familiar with the systems. The other
aspect I think is more social. To a certain degree a lot of processes around
contribution or interaction assume that people are constant contributors and
always active (or connected). For example, how often do people push a patch
up for review and then bug a bunch of cores on IRC about it. That's not really
an option if you only can contribute for an 1 hr or 2 on the weekends. This is
an area where I'd like to see the TC start driving more active change to improve
the situation so we can hopefully start to grow the number of casual
contributors we have to the project.

Thanks for reading, I hope this outlines where my focus and priorities would be
if I'm lucky enough to be elected for another term.

Thanks,

Matthew Treinish

IRC: mtreinish
Review history: https://review.openstack.org/#/q/reviewer:mtreinish%2540kortar.org
Commit history: https://review.openstack.org/#/q/owner:mtreinish%2540kortar.org
Blog: http://blog.kortar.org/
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