Open Stack

On 20 May, 2018 the OpenStack foundation staff, board, technical
committee, and user committee held a joint leadership meeting at
the summit venue in Vancouver to discuss current events and issues
related to the OpenStack community.  Alan Clark, Melvin Hillsman,
and I chaired the meeting together, though Alan did most of the
coordination work during the meeting.

Because the board was present, I want to give the disclaimer that
this summary is from my perspective and based on my notes. It does
not in any way reflect an official summary of the meeting.

I will also give a further disclaimer that some of these notes may
be out of order because the actual agenda [1] was changed on-site
to accommodate some participants who could not be present for the
entire day.

We opened the day by welcoming and introducing new members of the
3 groups. Ruan HE is a new board member from Tencent. Graham Hayes,
Mohammed Naser, and Zane Bitter are the 3 newly elected TC members
this term. Amy Marrich and Yih Leong Sun are newly elected to the
UC.

In particular, the discussion of fixing a long-standing issue with
a mistake in the bylaws was moved to the start of the day. The
problem has to do with section 3.b.i of the appendix that
describes the Technical Committee, which reads "An Individual Member
is an ATC who has..." but should read "An ATC is an Individual
Member who has..."[2]  Everyone agreed that is clearly a mistake, but
because of where it appears in the bylaws actually fixing it will
require a vote of the foundation membership. The board approved a
resolution authorizing the secretary to include a fix on the ballot
for the next board elections. There may be other bylaws changes at
the same time to address the expansion of the foundation into other
strategic areas, since the current bylaws do not currently cover
the governance structure for any projects other than OpenStack
itself.  None of those other changes have been discussed in detail,
yet.

Next, the foundation executive staff gave an update on several
foundation- and event-related topics. I didn't take a lot of notes
during this section, but a few things stood out for me:

1. They are going to change the user survey to be an annual event,
   in part to avoid survey fatigue.
2. The call for proposals for the Berlin Summit is open already.
3. After Berlin, the next summit will be in Denver, but downtown
   at the convention center, not the site of the PTG.

During this section of the meeting Kandan Kathirvel of AT&T mentioned
a desire to lower the cost of platinum membership because platinum
members are already contributing significant developer resources.
This was not discussed at any real length, but it may come up again
at a regular board meeting, where a change like that could be
considered formally.

After the foundation update, Melvin and Dims gave an update on
OpenLab [3], a project to test the integration of various cloud ecosystem
tools, including running Kubernetes on OpenStack and various cloud
management libraries that communicate with OpenStack.

Next, I gave a presentation discussing contribution levels in individual
projects to highlight the impact an individual contributor can have on
OpenStack [4].

The purpose of raising this topic was to get input into why the
community's "help wanted" areas are not seeing significant
contributions. We spent a good amount of time talking about the
issue, and several ideas were put forward. These ranged from us not
emphasizing the importance and value of mentoring enough to not
explaining to contributing companies why these gaps in the community
were important from a business perspective. At the end of the
discussion we had volunteers from the board (Allison Randal, Alan
Clark, Prakash Ramchandran, Chris Price, and Johan Christenson) and
TC (Sean, Graham, Dims, and Julia) ready to work on reframing the
contribution gaps in terms of "job descriptions" that explain in
more detail what is needed and what benefit those roles will provide.
As mentioned in this week's TC update, Dims has started working on
a template already.

Next, Melvin and Matt Van Winkle gave a presentation on the work
the user committee has been doing [5]. They covered the status of the
UC-led working groups and both short and long term goals.

Next, the foundation staff covered their plans for in-person meetings
during 2019. The most significant point of interest to the contributor
community from this section of the meeting was the apparently
overwhelming interest from companies employing contributors, as
well as 2/3 of the contributors to recent releases who responded
to the survey, to bring the PTG and summit back together as a single
event. This had come up at the meeting in Dublin as well, but in
the time since then the discussions progressed and it looks much
more likely that we will at least try re-combining the two events.
We discussed several reasons, including travel expense, travel visa
difficulties, time away from home and family, and sponsorship of
the events themselves.

There are a few plans under consideration, and no firm decisions
have been made, yet. We discussed a strawman proposal to combine
the summit and PTG in April, in Denver, that would look much like
our older Summit events (from the Folsom/Grizzly time frame) with
a few days of conference and a few days of design summit, with some
overlap in the middle of the week.  The dates, overlap, and
arrangements will depend on venue availability.

The remainder of the joint meeting was spent on revising the
foundation mission statement [6]. This isn't the OpenStack mission
statement, but the one for the foundation itself. The current mission
is:

   "The OpenStack Foundation is an independent body providing shared
   resources to help achieve the OpenStack Mission by Protecting,
   Empowering, and Promoting OpenStack software and the community
   around it, including users, developers and the entire ecosystem."

We considered 7 perspectives on what the mission statement should
include

1. Who do we serve?
2. What do we wish to achieve?
3. What are the attributes of what we seek to achieve?
4. What needs do we fulfill?
5. What is the market scope?
6. What makes us unique?
7. and what else is missing?

The exercise was very tactile, and involved moving around the room
and placing post-it notes with short phrases into groups under each
of those sections. As such, it didn't lend itself well to a summary
for someone who doesn't have all of the bits of paper involved.
Since Alan collected those, I imagine we will see a summary from
him before the next joint leadership meeting.

Following the joint meeting, the board held a meeting in which they
discussed committee updates.  I missed this portion of the day due
to hallway conversations about other topics.

Doug

[1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Governance/Foundation/20May2018BoardMeeting
[2] https://www.openstack.org/legal/technical-committee-member-policy/
[3] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12y6iTTvff4fzHiN31KApoO8JayZOsJySZugtLBc6XnE/edit#slide=id.g39da8667de_0_6
[4] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1wsPfeGC83I5C8s6-9tlsxz49bBRY5PHdIdXGxutVqgA/edit#slide=id.p
[5] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-xQApxg3xY3jBagID3PO1MCJiFYPaAw8yHmFdtMj8Pc/edit#slide=id.g33768e8068_2_244
[6] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/UnofficialBoardNotes-May20-2018