All My Peers,
TL;DR - I will increase adoption of OpenStack by removing governance RED TAPE and mentoring individuals interested in these objectives. A brief history of time: I started my journey in OpenStack by doing a gap analysis of AWS to OpenkStack at my previous employer Red Hat, Inc. This gap analysis turned up all kinds of gaps in OpenStack four years ago. I personally believed for OpenStack to be successful, it needed to expand beyond a compute kit and deliver a complete IaaS platform. Four years ago there was not really a way to add projects to OpenStack. There was no big tent, but instead an incubation track. It was very poorly defined (half a wiki page), so I went about the efforts of solving one of the most fundamental problems in OpenStack: Adding a new project to OpenStack. I did this by combining my previous gap analysis with my experience starting and leading Open Source projects to solve one of the most fundamental gaps in OpenStack: Orchestration. This led to the founding of the Heat project with Angus Salkeld of which I served as PTL for 18 months. At the time the bar to add projects to OpenStack was stratospheric. Fortunately the dedication and perseverance of the Heat project team resulted in the addition of Heat as an incubated and later integrated project as did another project Ceilometer led by Nick Barcet that also went through the same process at nearly the same time as Heat. Once Ceilometer and Heat were integrated into the integrated release of OpenStack, a herd of projects attempted incubation into OpenStack and the technical committee was faced with a dilemma. In early 2014, OpenStack governance isolated projects into "programs". The technical committee believed it was necessary to integrate all these new projects into existing programs. The learning process from that led to the origination of the Big Tent, of which I am a super hard-core fan. Once the Big Tent was reality, the bar for entry as a legitimate OpenStack project was far lowered, creating a framework for new innovative projects to flourish, evolve, and add value to the OpenStack community. In mid 2014 I was feeling a little frustrated after recruiting a fantastic diversely affiliated team and community and still feeling like a track athlete for jumping all the hurdles in the way of making Heat an integrated program. How could others go through this effort without all the hurdles? I lacked an answer. Fortunately the technical committee cut the RED TAPE by introducing the Big Tent in late 2014 which re-energized me into solving OpenStack's next two major gaps. The first gap was lack of support for container workloads (solved by Magnum), where Adrian Otto served a PTL while I recruited a majority of the core reviewer team and implemented much of the original architecture. At the nearly the same time in 2015, I personally believed existing deployment of OpenStack was too complex and error prone and formed the Kolla project. I recruited a great core review team with Kolla and trained this young team on how to "Open Source". I feel Kolla is one of OpenStack's greatest successes - a team with a high degree of diverse affiliations to solve OpenStack's #1 problem: How do I deploy the damn thing! Now, I as the PTL of Kolla am faced with a problem: RED TAPE! The technical committee decided during the Big Tent process that projects should be labeled with tags. Whether tagging is dangerous or not to OpenStack projects I leave for a different forum, but there is Operator value in the tagging process. Tags provide a mechanisms to automate information transfer and serve as a selection criteria for the OpenStack Operator community who represent the folks that are actually going to deploy the software the OpenStack developer community creates. The current tags as they are written are full of RED TAPE [1]. It is not easy writing a tag that doesn't require onerous hurdle jumping. I wrote a couple type: tags myself [2][3] and it is not the blame of the technical committee that the tags can appear so onerous to fresh projects like Kolla that have only been in the Big Tent for ten months. It is a complex challenge handling all cases with a limited document. To correct the deficiencies of the governance repository, we need to collectively involve the community in the governance repository development process. I don't want to "overthrow" the technical committee as it stands. I think they have done a fantastic job of keeping up with rapid pace of OpenStack's growth. I honestly don't think I could have done a better job in the past. That said, I would appreciate the opportunity to contribute to the technical committee's efforts bringing to the table my 4 years of experience as PTL or co-PTL of the Heat, Magnum, and Kolla projects as well as my previous work in Open Source including leadership positions in the high availability community, leading Corosync, and serving as an author for the Linux Foundation's Carrier Grade Linux specifications. My professional mission in the past has been to make OpenStack and the developers I mentor grow. I want to expand my professional mission with: "Grow the OpenStack ecosystem by reducing or removing hurdles and mentoring individuals interested in these objectives." If elected for the technical committee I will deliver on this mission by: * Promoting project affiliation diversity wherever possible. * Serve as a Champion for community members wishing someone else would just remove the RED TAPE so they could get on with their jobs by authoring and driving changes to the governance repository at request. * Enforce via automated tooling and human intervention an accurate accounting of the tags used in the governance repository so that Operators can actually count on the tags being accurate rather than applied inconsistently. * Mentor fresh Project Team Leads how the governance repository operates. * Mentor Project Team Leads on the governance repository workflow to solve their own problems. * Lead the development of a feedback loop between the technical committee and Project Team Leads relating to tagging and RED TAPE removal. * Democratize the governance repository so thirteen individuals don't decide feature tagging of technical projects; rather the project teams feed their ideas into the governance repository directly. This can already be done today but is rarely undertaken. I am able to do most of these things today in an unofficial capacity. Becoming a member of the technical committee with your vote would help reach a wider audience with my mission and permit me to have a bigger impact by helping shape the governance of OpenStack. I would be pleased to accept your vote and serve as your technical committee representative and deliver on the commitments made above. With my twenty years of R&D development experience coupled with my four years of PTL experience and extensive technical involvement in the growth of OpenStack [4][5], I believe I am in a fantastic position to serve as your voice and mentor others to use theirs. Warm Regards, Steven Dake My freenode IRC nickname is: sdake [1] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/294212/ [2] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/295528/ [3] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/295971/ [4] Reviews: http://stackalytics.com/?user_id=sdake&release=all&metric=marks [5] Commits: http://stackalytics.com/?user_id=sdake&release=all&metric=commits
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