I am announcing my candidacy for a position on the OpenStack Technical Committee.
I am currently employed by HP to work upstream on OpenStack. I started contributing in 2012, not long after joining DreamHost. I am one of the founding members of the Ceilometer project, and a core reviewer for the requirements and unified command line interface projects. I am also part of the team working on the Python 3 transition, and have contributed to several of the infrastructure projects. Kilo will be my third term serving as PTL for the Oslo project, and I have served on the Technical Committee for the last year. In addition to my technical contributions, I helped to found and still help to organize the OpenStack meetup group in Atlanta, Georgia. I've included the answers to the formally posed election questions below, but please follow up here with any other questions you might have for me. The OpenStack community is the most exciting and welcoming group I have interacted with in more than 20 years of contributing to open source projects. I'm looking forward to continuing to being a part of the community and serving the project. Thank you, Doug Review history: https://review.openstack.org/#/q/reviewer:2472,n,z Commit history: https://review.openstack.org/#/q/owner:2472,n,z Stackalytics: http://stackalytics.com/?user_id=doug-hellmann Foundation: http://www.openstack.org/community/members/profile/359 OpenHUB: https://www.openhub.net/accounts/doughellmann Freenode: dhellmann Website: http://doughellmann.com * Topic: OpenStack Mission * * How do you feel the technical community is doing in meeting the * OpenStack Mission? I am amazed by what our community produces. We have some truly exceptional development teams building great software. We regularly add new components to the system, and our feature set is as diverse as the community. Our work is not perfect, but as we continue to refine it based on experience and input from users, we are continually improving the way we work and what we produce. However, there are recurring themes in the user feedback after every release: We need to make OpenStack easier to operate, easier to use, and easier to debug. We are starting to build cross-project teams to work more directly on some of these areas, and it's important that we give priority to that work and consider usability and scalability as features. * Topic: Technical Committee Mission * * How do you feel the technical committee is doing in meeting the * technical committee mission? We're fulfilling most of the mission, but we can do better. The Zaqar graduation discussion is a good example of an area where we need to rethink how we bring new project teams into OpenStack. There are several similar suggestions to drop our current incubation and integration process completely, and that is one option. Another is to set up the resources we would need to do an objective technical evaluation for projects. I favor a combination of those two ideas, evaluating projects on several criteria from the users' perspective, but deciding the "official" status of a team based on community considerations. We have also recognized that we need some way to handle cross-project initiatives such as improving our logging to make debugging easier, but we do not yet have a formal structure in place to accomplish those goals. The way we set up working groups for those sorts of jobs is going to depend on the outcome of the bigger governance discussion, but I think they should be organized by the TC. * Topic: Contributor Motivation * * How would you characterize the various facets of contributor * motivation? I don't know if we have numbers, but my impression is that most of our contributions come from people employed at least in part to work on OpenStack. Their commitment to the project as a whole, outside of their area of specialty, varies for a lot of reasons. We want everyone to have a strong commitment to the whole project, but that's not always realistic, because it's not always up to the individual to decide how much time or effort they can put into working on OpenStack, or into a given area. That's perfectly normal and OK. We can, and do, welcome contributions from all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons. * Topic: Rate of Growth * * There is no argument the OpenStack technical community has a * substantial rate of growth. What are some of the consequences of * this rate? Growing so quickly is forcing us to think about how we organize our selves and make changes explicitly, and more rapidly, rather than allowing for a slower evolution. We've had a lot of blog posts and mailing list threads talking about ways to handle the growth through governance model changes to the project. These are important decisions for us to make as a community, and we need to weigh both sides of each issue carefully. For example, we want to be more inclusive and bring more project teams into OpenStack, but doing that further strains our cross-project teams' capacity to help us all with documentation, infrastructure, and release management. More creative independence for projects can increase complexity for deployers and users as we drift away from consistent patterns. Providing incentives for creating new projects may take away incentives for collaborating on existing projects, ultimately hurting both projects. In each of these cases we want some aspects of both sides of the equation, but we need to strike a balance. Working out the changes we need to our existing set of policies will take more thought and discussion [1], as we try to predict the consequences of the proposed changes and craft new policies that are flexible enough to continue to maintain a healthy community. [1] https://review.openstack.org/#/q/status:open+project:openstack/governance+topic:big-tent,n,z * Topic: New Contributor Experience * * How would you characterize the experience new contributors have * currently? There's no question that OpenStack has a steep learning curve, both as a user and a contributor. Documentation is useful as a reference, but there's nothing quite like having an experienced guide helping you first hand. I had the benefit of a couple of informal mentors when I started contributing. They walked me through the long process of setting up the tools and development environment I needed until I was able to submit my first patch, helped me get the most out of the design summit, and generally eased my entrance into the community. Today we have a few formal programs in the community to match mentors and new community members. Those programs deserve our support, but day to day, we can all do a little bit to help each other out by answering questions and sharing our knowledge freely. * Topic: Communication * * How would you describe our current state of communication in the * OpenStack community? Our growth is making communication more challenging, but we are adapting. The specs process has helped with technical planning, setting expectations, and recording decisions. Still, we have a lot of initiatives not tied directly to specs -- especially those that span project boundaries and releases. I told the Oslo team that my mantra for this cycle is "Write it down," by which I mean we should clearly document our discussions and decisions so when a topic comes up again we do not have to rely on our memory. IRC is a great medium for quick iteration, but it's lousy as a historical record. Communication is the key to maintaining a healthy open source community. Keeping up can be difficult, but we all have to pay attention to the messages coming out of other teams, to watch for anything relevant, then participate in the conversation. * Topic: Relationship with the Foundation Board * * The technical committee interacts with the foundation board on several * different fronts. How would you describe these interactions? I have a somewhat better impression of the relationship between the TC and Board than has been expressed by other candidates. We are different groups, with different perspectives, but we are all working in what we consider to be the best interests of the OpenStack project and that means working together. The face-to-face meeting in Atlanta allowed some of that attitude to show through in ways that it doesn't always in IRC or phone meetings. We have had spirited debates on topics like DefCore and the CLA, as is natural for groups with such different perspectives, but we are also continuing to work together to find ways to solve those and other issues. _______________________________________________ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
