Hi all!

I Mike Perez aka. thingee, am announcing my candidacy for a position in the
OpenStack Technical Committee.

I am employed by the OpenStack Foundation as a Developer Coordinator to help
bring focus/support to cross-project initiatives via the cross-project
specs, Def Core, The Product Working group, etc.

I feel the items below have enabled others across this project to strive for
quality. If you would all have me as a member of the Technical Committee, you
can help me to enable more quality work in OpenStack.

* I have been working in OpenStack since 2010. I spent a good amount of my time
  working on OpenStack in my free time before being paid full time to work on
  it. It has been an important part of my life, and rewarding to see what we
  have all achieved together.

* I was PTL for the Cinder project in the Kilo and Liberty releases.

* I led the effort in bringing third party continuous integration to the
  Cinder project for more than 60 different drivers. [1]
  * I removed 25 different storage drivers from Cinder to bring quality to the
    project to ensure what was in the Kilo release would work for operators.
    I did what I believed was right, regardless of whether it would cost me
    re-election for PTL [2].
  * See epic thread on this once deadline happened [3]
  * In my conversations with other projects, this has enabled others to want to
    follow the same effort.
    - Ironic now has a road map for doing third-party CI. [4][5]

* I have attempted to help with diversity in our community, and I think it's
  great to have people in the committee that views this as a priority.
  - Helped lead our community to raise $17,403 for the Ada Initiative [6],
    which was helping address gender-diversity with a focus in open source.
  - For the Vancouver summit, I helped bring in the ally skills workshops from
    the Ada Initiative, so that our community can continue to be a welcoming
    environment [4].
  - I have assisted Emily Hugenbruch with the OpenStack mentor program [7].
  - Based on some of the surveys the diversity working group has been doing,
    OpenStack's tool chain of IRC, gerrit, and git was expressed as being
    difficult to get started with. I started writing documentation to provide
    step-by-step with screen shots to help improve our on-boarding experience
    [8].

* I started the OpenStack Mailing List Digest, in order to enable others to
  keep up with the dev list on important information. [9][10]

* When Open Core was being discussed by the TC, numerous times I spoke to the
  TC about my disagreements with accepting projects in OpenStack's big tent if
  testing is only possible with a commercial entity. [11][12] I believe
  OpenStack service APIs should be based off an open source reference
  implementation that we're able to do integration tests with in gate. Anyone
  who begins to play with OpenStack should be able to run OpenStack with full
  features without a commercial entity/driver.
  - See my discussions with the TC in their meeting in raising quality and
    being able to fully test projects we're considering in accepting in the big
    tent [13].

* I have properly established the cross-project team [14] as well as the
  members that represent each OpenStack project [15].


As a TC member I want to bring focus in some areas:

1) Installation Documentation - I think all projects in the big tent should
   have installation documentation. In order for projects to gain adoption and
   gather better feedback, operators need to know how to install things. Today
   majority of projects in the big tent have no installation documentation,
   some which have existed for more than three years and still nothing. Where
   are these projects going? In addition I want to make all new projects
   entering the big tent come with clear documentation for installation. See
   the beginning discussions I'm starting here [16].

2) As expressed in the earlier point, there are some projects in the big tent
   that seem to have no clear direction and are lacking adoption after existing
   for years in the community. I'd like to work with these projects and see how
   we can move things forward to gain maturity, and some to be accepted in with
   Defcore and refstack. Otherwise I think these projects should be reevaluated
   in the value they're bringing to the big tent. This won't be easy, but it
   needs to be done to make sure community focus and resources we use from the
   Infra team is spent well. See the TC discussing CI resources VS project
   growth [17].

3) As expressed in the earlier point, Defcore plays a role in helping us define
   a set tests that will be ran against deployed OpenStack clouds interested in
   using the trademark. I'd like to continue working with both individual
   projects and Defcore/refstack in seeing if it's possible to make other
   services available in public clouds. For example I'm curious on the future
   of projects like Heat or Murano being available from one cloud to the next.
   Today not every public cloud has orchestration available. When I look at the
   bigger picture of federated clouds, when will I be able to assume a cloud
   has certain resources/services available? I don't have an answer to this,
   but I would like to start discussions here and explore.

4) As being someone who is focused on cross-project initiatives, I would like
   to bring the TC more focused and aware on the efforts done by the
   cross-project team and the API working group. There's nothing today helping
   their efforts to bring consistency to OpenStack, see previous conversations
   with the TC on this issue [18]. The API working group are writing agreed
   guidelines by the community, I would like to see these moved on from being
   just optional, especially making new potential big tent projects more aware
   before they diverge too far. Potentially making these guidelines things we
   identify as being an OpenStack project and requirement to even be accepted
   by the TC.

Please help me to do more positive work in this project. It would be an honor
to be member of your technical committee.


Thank you,
Mike Perez (thingee)


[1] - http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2015-January/054614.html
[2] - https://review.openstack.org/#/q/status:merged+project:openstack/cinder+branch:master+topic:cinder-driver-removals,n,z
[3] - http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2015-March/thread.html#59453
[4] - http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2015-December/080867.html
[5] - https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Ironic/Testing#Third_Party_CI
[6] - http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-October/047892.html
[7] - https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Mentor://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Mentors
[8] - https://review.openstack.org/#/c/286941/
[9] - https://www.openstack.org/blog/2016/03/openstack-developer-mailing-list-digest-20160311/
[10] - https://www.openstack.org/blog/2016/03/openstack-developer-mailing-list-digest-20160304/
[11] - http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-February/086737.html
[12] - http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-February/0861http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/tc/2016/tc.2016-02-09-20.01.log.html#l-29310.html
[13] - http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/tc/2016/tc.2016-02-09-20.01.log.html#l-293
[14] - http://docs.openstack.org/project-team-guide/cross-project.html
[15] - https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/CrossProjectLiaisons#Cross-Project_Spec_Liaisons
[16] - http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-March/090214.html
[17] - http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/tc/2016/tc.2016-03-01-20.01.log.html#l-340
[18] - http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/tc/2016/tc.2016-02-02-20.01.log.html#l-261