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Hi everyone,
I've been on the OpenStack Technical Committee forever, and my original plan was to not run for re-election this cycle. Thanks to name recognition, incumbents have traditionally easily been reelected. Stepping down is the only way to make room for new leaders to emerge, a process that is necessary to keep alignment between the Technical Committee members and the active contributors that are their constituency.
So, having room for new members to be elected is necessary. At the same time, there is value in historical perspective, and experienced members are useful to help newcomers into their role. We also need to be careful about the message that too many people stepping down would send. So, it's a mixed bag – we need enough, but not too many people stepping down.
Over the past cycles, we introduced about 3 new people at every election. I think renewing 3 or 4 people every 6 months in a committee of 13 members is the right balance. We already have three experienced members who announced they would not be running again this cycle, so I feel like it might not be the best moment for me to step down.
With the OSF shifting from being solely about OpenStack to more generally tackling the open infrastructure space, my focus has certainly expanded lately. But I don't want to feed the trolls arguing that we are leaving OpenStack behind. I'm not done with the OpenStack TC yet, and would like to advance two more things before stepping down.
OpenStack is in the middle of a transition – from hyped project driven by startups and big service providers to a more stable project led by people running it or having a business depending on it. A lot of the systems and processes that I helped put in place to cope with explosive growth are now holding us back. We need to adapt them to a new era, and I feel like I can help bringing the original perspective of why those systems were put in place, so hopefully we do not end up throwing the baby with the bath water.
I feel like there is also a lot of work to do to better present what we produce. The work on the OpenStack map and the "software" pages on the openstack.org website is far from complete. OpenStack is still much harder to navigate and understand for a newcomer than it should be. I want to continue that work for one more year.
So I am announcing my candidacy for a position on the OpenStack Technical Committee in the upcoming election. Thank you for your consideration !
– Thierry Carrez (ttx)