Greetings! I am currently a member of the TC, and I would like to continue to serve.
I'm going to write this email backwards because I am aware it is quite long. I have put what I hope to achieve on the TC at the top, but provide background detail afterwards for those who want to dig deeper. I am of course happy to answer questions. == Executive summary == * I am a Nova and Oslo core reviewer, who works full time on upstream OpenStack * Provide geographic diversity to the TC, doing my best to represent the APAC region * Continue to incubate new projects so long as they form a logical part of a cloud deployment, regardless of whether they will graduate within a single release * We need to work on improving documentation, and I'd like to see the TC work on this in Icehouse * Assist the Foundation Board in defining "what is core" and placing high quality technical evangelists at conferences around the world * Also, I have a cool accent == What I want to get done on the TC in Icehouse == First off, the TC has incubated a number of projects in the Havana release, and I'd like to see that continue. I think its important that we build a platform that includes the services that a deployer would need to build a cloud and that those platform elements work well together. Now, its clear that not everyone will deploy all of the projects we are incubating, but I think its still important that they play well together and have a consistent look and feel. I suspect that ultimately we'll need to work out how to handle this growth differently -- we have a lot of PTLs now and the summit is going to be super busy, but these are both good problems to have and I am confident that we can solve them as a community. I also do not believe that an incubated project needs to graduate within one release. I'd rather take a less mature project if we think it has a good chance of getting to graduation in the forseeable future and work with them, than ignore them and then be surprised that they never became a well integrated project. We need to get better at documentation, and the TC needs to do more in this area. Having high quality documentation is very important to the continued success of OpenStack. Anne Gentle and the docs team are doing a fantastic job, but I am personally of the belief that the docs team simply isn't big enough to keep up with the work load we impose on them. I'd like to see the community, lead by the TC, discuss how we can grow that team and produce the documentation the project deserves. I've seen proposals that we block code reviews which don't have an associated doc patch for example, and while I think that's too blunt a metric we need to do _something_. Could we do something with reporting the number of undocumented features are landing? Could we be better at approaching corporate contributors and asking for more documentation support? The TC needs to also provide more assistance to the Foundation Board. The reality is that the Board and TC don't solve isolated problems -- they both work on different aspects of the same problem. The Board has been doing really good work, but the TC should be helping what defines "core" OpenStack. While this discussion might be framed as being about trademarks, it ultimately affects how users see our software and I think that matters a lot to the technical people as well. I'd also like the TC to be helping the Foundation place technical talks at conferences around the world. We have a limited window to drive OpenStack deployment, and having solid technical talks at as many technical conferences around the world as possible is one of the ways we can achieve that. While I'm lucky enough to work somewhere with good support for these activities internally, that's not true of all of our developers. The TC and Board should be working together to identify high quality technical evangelists, and then helping them get accepted at conferences. Perhaps the Board can also allocated some travel support for this sort of activity -- I'd love to see that happen. Overall I think the TC should be helping the Board more. The TC has unique insights into what projects and events matter to the technical deployers of OpenStack, and we should be helping the Foundation make good decisions. During the Havana release there was one meeting between the TC and the Board (the day before the Havana summit opened) that I am aware of, and I think we need to be talking more than that. == Background == I first started hacking on Nova during the Diablo release, with my first code contributions appearing in the Essex release. Since then I've hacked mostly on Nova and Oslo, although I have also contributed to many other projects as my travels have required. For example, I've tried hard to keep various projects in sync with their imports of parts of Oslo I maintain. I work full time on OpenStack at Rackspace, leading a team of developers who work solely on upstream open source OpenStack. I am a Nova and Oslo core reviewer. I am in fact one of the most active code reviewers for Nova. I have been serving on the TC for the last six months. == Current goals == While I am still personally focussed on Nova, I have also spent much of the last release getting others involved in the community. This has included proposing an OpenStack mini-conference at linux.conf.au 2014, which has been accepted. I have also spoken about OpenStack at a variety of Australian conferences and meetups. I want to spend the next release continuing to try and bring new people into the community. I went along to the recent docs bootcamp hosted by Mirantis to try and work out how Nova developers can make life easier for the docs team. There are some obvious things we can do there, such as being more consistent with requiring DocImpact comments and what content they should contain. I even ended up writing some doc patches to see how the other half lives. Its much harder than it looks. I run a team of OpenStack developers in Australia which has hired three people in the last couple of months, and which will continue to grow. I've been trying hard with this team to not just hire smart people, but to also hire people new to the community as I believe that we ultimately need to grow the pool of contributors instead of just poaching off each other. That's not to say that people shouldn't move between OpenStack companies (I have), but that its not sufficient by itself to meet our future needs. I am still focused on operations as well, as that's the background I come from. Most of my contributions to Nova in Havana were attempts to make Nova easier to operate, and that will continue in Icehouse. Better console support, deferred instance file delete, continuing to make periodic tasks work better and CI tests for database migrations are all problems I want to attack in the next release. Finally, I believe the TC has taken some interesting steps in the last six months that put us a good direction -- not assuming PTLs will serve on the TC, and introducing programmes for example. The TC fills an important role in trying to keep our overall offering coherent, and I'd like to continue to work on that problem. Thanks, Michael -- Rackspace Australia _______________________________________________ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
