Jonathan Bryce 

March 3rd, 2011

We’ve built quite an open source community together since we launched less than eight months ago!  What started as a small group of people committed to building an open cloud standard, has grown to hundreds of developers and more than 50 participating organizations virtually overnight.  From the beginning, this community was founded with the goal of diversity of participation and a firm commitment to what we call “the 4 opens”:  Open Source, Open Design, Open Development and Open Community.

As we take stock of the amazing interest and growth, keeping in mind the initiative’s goals and commitment to openness, the time has come to evolve the governance process to match the new reality of a larger, more diverse community.  To that end, the governance process has been updated, with full details published here.

As you read through the highlights below, we encourage you to get personally involved to steer this community to an even bigger, brighter future.  Whether it’s participating in a spirited debate on the mailing list, attending the bi-annual design summits, or even running for one of the elected positions, there are a lot of ways to get involved and there’s no time like the present to dive in.  Nominations and elections will be held later this month for many elected positions.

Highlights:

• Each Project — OpenStack Compute (Nova), OpenStack Object Storage (Swift), and the OpenStack image service (Glance) will elect their own Project Technical Leads (starting later this month, March 2011) to run the projects and make day-to-day technical decisions.  Elections will be held every six months, just prior to each design summit, and these elected leaders will be instrumental in guiding those public design summits and setting the future direction of their project.

• The Project Oversight Committee – which has been charged with setting policies that span projects as well as determining when new projects should be added – will be renamed the Project Policy Board effective immediately, to better reflect their mission.

• This Project Policy Board will be revamped to become more nimble and ensure broad representation.  Specifically, 2/3 of the seats on the board will now be elected rather than appointed by Rackspace:
  • 5 General Board Seats elected to one-year terms, with elections occurring prior to each design summit (2 each spring*, 3 each Fall)
  • 3 Board Seats reserved for the winners of the Project Technical Lead elections* (more as we add projects)
  • 4 seats appointed by Rackspace

• We are establishing an OpenStack Advisory Board of senior advisors comprised of major commercial sponsors (those who are building businesses on OpenStack), enterprises and service providers who are deploying it, and category experts.  The primary function of this body is to provide guidance on OpenStack’s mission, and to evangelize on its behalf.  Prior to the Spring 2011 Design Summit, Rackspace will appoint the initial members from a variety of organizations – but the board will then determine its own plans and requirements for expansion.

Again, we invite everyone to get involved and have your voice heard.  If you’re interested in running for the Project Policy Board, or becoming a Project Technical Leader, now’s the time to throw your hat in the ring.  Registration for the second public Design Summit will open in the next few days, in which members of the community set the roadmap and make technical decisions to drive the projects forward.  You can get plugged in with our new community page at openstack.org/community.

• Sign up for mailing lists: https://launchpad.net/~openstack
• Join IRC: #openstack on Freenode
• Follow the events page to meetup: www.openstack.org/events/
• Search and post OpenStack jobs www.openstack.org/jobs/