Open Stack

Hi, I'm Chris Dent, cdent on IRC.

I'm once again nominating myself to be your representative on the
Technical Committee. I've been around OpenStack for about three
years, most recently visible as the guy who writes those weekly
updates about the placement API service and talks about the
API-WG.

In the past several months we've seen the TC starting to take a more
active role in describing and shaping the technical and cultural
environment of OpenStack. Initiatives like release goals, TC and
OpenStack vision exercises, discussions on how to reasonably
constrain growth and increased attention to writing things down are
all positives.

Meanwhile the economic environment for cloud technology and for
technical contributors has been a roller coaster. Lots of things are
changing in the world of OpenStack.

OpenStack must adapt. Doing so without losing the progress that's
been made will be hard and requires input from a diversity of
voices; people who are willing and able to critique and investigate
the status quo but also understand the importance of consensus and
value of compromise.

Voting for the TC is weird: people nominate themselves and then a
small segment of the electorate places their votes based on some
combination of "have I heard of this person before", "have I
witnessed some of their work and liked it", and, sometimes,
discussion that happens as a result of these candidacy statements. I
hope you'll ask me some questions in the week before the election,
but in an effort to illustrate the biases and concerns I would bring
to the TC here are some opinions I have related to governance:

* Telling stories that explain what and why are more useful in the
   long run than listing rules of how because they lead to a more
   complete understanding.

* It is always better to over communicate than under communicate and
   it is best to do so in a written and discoverable fashion. Not just
   because this helps to keep everyone already involved up to date
   but because it also enables connections with new people and other
   communities.

* The OpenStack ecosystem needs to open up to allow and encourage
   those connections. Open ecosystems can evolve and benefit from
   exchange of ideas. So yes, of course, we should use some golang.
   Of course we should party with kubernetes and trade ideas with
   them.

* OpenStack is better when its people and its projects have opinions
   about lots of things, share those opinions widely, and use them to
   make better stuff and make better decisions.

* There are too many boundaries (some real, some perceived) between
   developers _of_ OpenStack, developers _using_ OpenStack, users,
   and operators. We're all in this together. All of those people
   should be encouraged and able to be contributors and all of those
   people should be users.

* OpenStack can and should do a lot of complicated stuff for big
   enterprises (things like NFV and high performance VMs) but the
   changes required to satisfy those use cases must always be
   balanced and measured against providing a useful and usable cloud
   for individual humans.

* As we move forward on the idea of OpenStack as one platform made
   with many pieces, we have an opportunity to re-evaluate and
   refactor our architecture and project structure to make it easier
   for improvement to happen. We need to ask ourselves if the
   boundaries we currently maintain, technical and social, are the
   right ones, and change the ones that are not.

* For a lot of people, contributing to OpenStack is a job. Working
   on OpenStack should be a good experience for everyone. I think
   of being a TC member as something akin to a union representative:
   striving to keep things sane and positive for the individual
   contributor in the face of change and conflict.

With the TC positioning itself to take a more active role, these
elections could be more important than you've come to expect.  The
people you choose, the attitudes they have, will shape that new
activism. If you feel like I'm talking some sense above, I'd
appreciate your vote. If you need some clarification, please ask me
some questions. After that, if you're still not convinced, please
vote for someone else. But please vote.

-- 
Chris Dent                 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯           https://anticdent.org/
freenode: cdent                                         tw: @anticdent