Open Stack

Hi everyone,

I am announcing my candidacy for the OpenStack manuals PTL position. 

Some of you may know me from the 2014 Paris summit where I cooed like a pigeon [1] in a panel discussion, but I hope that most of you will know me from my documentation work across OpenStack, specifically the OpenStack manuals project and OpenStack-Ansible contributions.

I have been an active contributor to OpenStack manuals since the beginning of 2014, and have been a core member since early 2015. Over these last 3 years, I was privileged to be a part of the sprint team that authored the first edition of the OpenStack Architecture Design Guide [2] (and the subsequent swarm team that fixed it up), the team that converted the manuals from XML to RST, the specialty team that worked on the creation and curation of the Contributor Guide, and the release management team for Ocata. I also worked with the OpenStack Infra team to create the new Deployment Guides section [3] at docs.openstack.org.

I regularly work in different OpenStack projects. For example, I assisted the Swift team to curate the Swift Ops Runbook [4], and have been helping the OpenStack-Ansible team rework their documentation [5]. 

I am passionate about our documentation, our community, and our team’s involvement across OpenStack. OpenStack manuals was never organised and facilitated by a single person. Behind the scenes there are a great number of individuals who work hard to ensure our ship stays afloat. As PTL, I would like to continue this trend by:

1. Improving cross-project documentation liaison relationships
a. Over the course of the Pike release, I plan to focus on developing better relationships with the cross-project liaisons and PTL’s of individual projects. I would like to promote and encourage developers and operators to get more involved in the development of OpenStack manuals content. OpenStack manuals takes on the responsibility of documenting and maintaining guides that represent the projects and tools developers and operators are working so hard to build and maintain. This written representation of their work is equally as important as the output. 
2. Continuing with Lana’s bug-depletion legacy
a. I plan to achieve this by reporting on completed bugs on a weekly basis and encouraging other contributors to report and fix one bug per week. When Lana first became PTL, she vowed to attack our enormous (and continuously growing) bug list. I'd like to continue this work, and will strive to find innovative ways to reduce our technical debt.

If you would like to know more about how I will work to improve our community and the manuals, I’d love to chat with you more on IRC or via email.

Coo coo,

Alexandra Settle

IRC: asettle
Twitter: dewsday
Email: a.settle at outlook.com

[1] https://youtu.be/PtomtKeJ0tc?t=1783 
[2] http://docs.openstack.org/arch-design/introduction-how-this-book-was-written.html 
[3] http://docs.openstack.org/project-deploy-guide/newton/
[4] http://docs.openstack.org/developer/swift/ops_runbook/index.html 
[5] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/openstack-ansible/+spec/osa-install-guide-overhaul