Most of you probably know me as "that short dude in the Hawaiian
shirt and long hair." I'll answer to "Jeremy," "fungi" or even just
"hey you." I'm starting my third cycle as PTL of the Infrastructure
team, and have been a core reviewer and root sysadmin for
OpenStack's community-maintained project infrastructure for the past
four years. I've also been doing vulnerability management in
OpenStack for almost as long, chaired conference tracks, and given
talks to other communities on a variety of OpenStack-related topics.
I help with elections, attend and participate in TC meetings and
review proposed changes to governance. I have consistent, strong
views in favor of free software and open/transparent community
process.

    https://wiki.openstack.org/user:fungi

I see OpenStack not as software, but as a community of people who
come together to build something for the common good. We've been
fortunate enough to experience a bubble of corporate interest which
has provided amazing initial momentum in the form of able software
developers and generous funding, but that can't last forever. As
time goes on, we will need to rely increasingly on effort from
people who contribute to OpenStack because it interests them, rather
than because some company is paying them to do so. The way I see it,
we should be preparing now for the future of our project:
independent, volunteer contributors drawn from the global free
software community. However, we're not succeeding in attracting them
the way some other projects do, which brings me to a major
concern...

OpenStack has a public relations problem we need to solve, and soon.
I know I'm not the only one who struggles to convince contributors
in other communities that we're really like them, writing free
software under transparent processes open to any who wish to help.
This skepticism comes from many sources, some overt (like our
massive trade conferences and marketing budget) while others
seemingly inconsequential (such as our constant influx of new
community members who are unfamiliar with free software concepts and
lack traditional netiquette). Overcoming this not-really-free
perception is something we absolutely must do to be able to attract
the unaffiliated volunteers who will continue to maintain OpenStack
through the eventual loss of our current benefactors and well into
stabilization.

Prior to OpenStack, I worked for longer than I care to remember as
an "operator" at Internet service, hosting and telecommunications
providers doing Unix systems administration, network engineering,
virtualization and information security. When I first started my
career, you couldn't be a capable systems administrator without a
firm grasp of programming fundamentals and couldn't be a good
programmer without understanding the basics of systems
administration. I'm relieved that, after many years of companies
trying to tell us otherwise, our industry as a whole is finally
coming back around to the same realization. Similarly, I don't
believe we as a community benefit by socializing a separation of
"operators" from "developers" and feel the role distinction many
attempt to strike between the two is at best vague, while at its
worst completely alienating a potential source of current and future
contributions.

What causes software to succeed in the long run is not hype,
limitless funding or even technical superiority, it's the size and
connectedness of its community of volunteers and users who invest
themselves and their personal time. The work we're doing now is
great, don't get me wrong, but for it to survive into the next
decade and beyond we need to focus more on building a close-knit
community of interested contributors even if it's not in the best
interests of industry pundits or vendor product roadmaps.

OpenStack is people. If we lose sight of that, it's over.