Open Stack

Hi everyone,

Back in 2016-2017, TC members participated in stewardship training at 
Zingerman's. Part of their framework relies on the concept of 
"visioning": how describing in details a desirable future helps you get 
there.

As a result of that training, TC members in 2017 created such a 
"vision"[1], set in 2019. As the sole TC survivor of these ancient times 
and as we close the 2019 year, it sounds appropriate to reflect back on 
this exercise and discuss if anything more should be done in that area.

[1] 
https://governance.openstack.org/tc/resolutions/20170404-vision-2019.html

The first part of the vision, "Navigating with Constellations", was 
describing efforts to make OpenStack components combinations more easy 
to understand for specific use cases, and individual components more 
easily reusable in other types of deployments.

The "constellation" concept never really took off, and product 
management is still very much done downstream of OpenStack. The "vision 
for OpenStack Clouds" living document[2] helped us refine our scope and 
better answer the "What is OpenStack" question. The OpenStack Map[3] 
helps navigate the ecosystem, and content on the software pages on 
openstack.org is now more directly driven[4] from the project teams, but 
overall making OpenStack easier to navigate is still very much a work in 
progress. That said, individual components are now generally easier to 
reuse in other contexts, as seen with Ironic reuse in Metal³.

The second part of the vision, "Working with Adjacent Communities", was 
describing how we should interact and combine our work with components 
produced by adjacent communities, rather than beginning and ending with 
OpenStack.

While the specific outcomes mentioned in the vision never happened, 
several efforts resulted in OpenStack having a more definite scope and 
place in the general technology landscape. Success of Kubernetes as an 
interoperable application deployment API helped position OpenStack more 
as an infrastructure provider. Our technical and non-technical 
experience was shared with adjacent communities like the cloud-native 
communities, but also with new open infrastructure projects under the OSF.

The third part, "Embracing Community Diversity", is probably where we've 
seen the less progress in the last 3 years. It describes efforts to get 
a more diverse contributor base and TC representation. I feel like we 
still have a long way to go in that area, although things are gradually 
improving: we have seen more and more users of OpenStack step up and 
lead project teams, we are also seeing people with more of an operator 
background be elected to the TC, and this year the TC saw its first 
APAC-based member.

The last part of the vision, "Growing New Leaders" describes 
facilitating inter-project work. Several initiatives have been put in 
place in that area since 2017. Community goals[5], SIGs[6], and more 
recently pop-up teams[7] (a concept which was described in the vision) 
all try to facilitate forming cross-disciplinary groups to advance 
complex inter-project issues in OpenStack.

In summary, little of the specific plans described in the vision have 
actually been put in place, and the topics mentioned in there are all 
still work in progress. That said, the vision was a useful exercise in 
that it defined areas of focus for the TC stewardship of the community, 
and it did definitely inspire several of the plans we put in place those 
last 3 years. It was a time-consuming exercise though, so I'm not sure 
we should go through that exercise again and painting a vision for 2023.

Comments, thoughts?

[2] https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/technical-vision.html
[3] http://www.openstack.org/openstack-map
[4] https://opendev.org/osf/openstack-map/
[5] https://governance.openstack.org/tc/goals/index.html
[6] https://governance.openstack.org/sigs/
[7] https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/popup-teams.html

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)