Open Stack

Hi everyone,

Since the Design Summit, the OpenStack Project Policy Board has been working to refine how new projects become an official part of OpenStack. Over the past few weeks, we've approved several policies and processes to create a more standard method for OpenStack project expansion.

Project Types
To clarify the relationship of the various projects in the OpenStack ecosystem, we have defined three project designations: core, incubated, related. These designations are described in detail on the wiki
(http://wiki.openstack.org/ProjectTypes) and projects are listed by category at this link: http://wiki.openstack.org/Projects .

Incubation Process
As you might have noticed, there is a new designation for incubated projects. The Policy Board has also approved creating an incubation program for projects that wish to become official core OpenStack projects and laid out an initial process for becoming an incubated project (http://wiki.openstack.org/Governance/Approved/Incubation). The incubation process will give new projects a chance to mature in their development methods and developer and user communities. Projects that wish to be incubated can apply to the Policy Board using the incubation application (http://wiki.openstack.org/Projects/IncubatorApplication).

New Project Additions
Once a project has been incubated successfully, the PPB will review it for promotion as a core OpenStack project. We have also allowed for the case where a mature project that is related wishes to join OpenStack. Adding new projects whether incubated or not is summarized in the wiki as well (http://wiki.openstack.org/Governance/Approved/NewProjectProcess). One thing to note in this document is that projects will not be promoted to core in the middle of a release cycle in order to make the release management process more sane. If a project is deemed ready to move to core, it would do so in the next release cycle.


We received feedback from a number of community members as we put this process together. Thanks for all the input. This provides us with a starting point for expansion, and we'll add more detail and more clearly defined guidelines for inclusion and evalation criteria as we go along at see where the holes are. It has been exciting to see all the momentum and energy in all of the projects that are popping up around OpenStack, and I hope this will help that to continue.

As a reminder, all of the Policy Board's business is done in the open through a launchpad mailing list and IRC meetings. You can find logs and minutes from previous meetings at http://wiki.openstack.org/Governance/PPB if you'd like to follow along. As always, please contact me with any feedback, comments or questions.

Jonathan