Open Stack

Hi everyone,

Growing new leaders has been a focus of the Technical Committee over the
last year: first discussed at the leadership workshop with Board members
in March 2017, then included in the TC "vision for 2019"[1] adopted in June.

As part of this objective, we actively looked for new stewards in our
community, provided opportunities to step up, and rotated key roles to
develop a deeper bench of ready leaders. But we never applied those
ideas for the TC chair position itself: I have been the only candidate
and holding that position since the creation of that governance body in
2012. The main reason for it is that tracking everything that's
happening is a significant commitment, and the Foundation is happy with
me investing that time in. That said, it's not ideal to have a role that
only one person can fill, so it's time for a change.

I am announcing my candidacy for a position on the OpenStack Technical
Committee in the upcoming election. However, if I'm elected I won't be a
candidate to the chair position for the upcoming TC session. To ensure a
seamless transition I will actively support the person who will be
chosen by the TC members. In all cases I'll be as involved with the TC
activities as I've always been.

In my opinion our vision for 2019[1] is still current. We have a lot of
work ahead of us to fully implement it, especially around the concept of
"Constellations" (representation of groups of OpenStack components that
answer a specific use case). Beyond that, our main challenge is to
continue to adapt OpenStack governance to the evolving needs of the
project. Most of our processes and structures come from back when we
doubled activity every year, when our main focus was to survive that
meteoritic growth. With OpenStack getting more mature and having more
adoption, we need to rethink those processes and structures with
long-term sustainability in mind. Finally, we need to navigate a
transition where everything produced by our community will no longer
necessarily be called "OpenStack", starting with Zuul being given its
own separate branding.

If you're passionate about open source project governance and interested
in tackling those challenges, please consider running for the Technical
Committee ! Several of the current members won't be running for
re-election, so seats are up for grabs.  We track current proposed
changes on a Tracker[2], track work items on StoryBoard[3], and usually
meet in person at Summits and PTGs. You can read past weekly "TC status
update" emails to get a better idea of the type of things we cover. I
would say the time commitment is between 2 and 6 hours a week. Join us !

[1]
https://governance.openstack.org/tc/resolutions/20170404-vision-2019.html
[2] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Technical_Committee_Tracker
[3] https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/project/923

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)