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Top 5 help wanted list
This document lists areas where the OpenStack Technical Committee seeks contributions to significantly help OpenStack as a whole. While in most cases things happen naturally through the normal contribution dynamics in the community, in some cases a tragedy of the commons is at play. Guidance, leadership and proper recognition of efforts is therefore needed to encourage individuals or organizations to contribute in areas where they could make a big impact.
Each item should clearly explain why the item matters (value of the effort to the community, operators and users), why we need help there (description of the current situation) and what experience or benefit the volunteer can expect to gain from tackling it. It should also include the name of a TC sponsor (responsible for evangelizing, articulating and channelling the work, but also facilitating connections between candidates and target teams). For an estimate of the commitment required, interested candidates should reach out to the TC sponsor, or the PTL of the affected project.
1. Documentation owners
The #1 pain point in OpenStack, especially for new potential adopters, is complexity. While cutting down complexity everwhere we can is critical, proper documentation is essential in addressing that complexity. It directly benefits operators and users of OpenStack, but also facilitates ramping up new direct contributors to the project itself.
The documentation team has been struggling with limited resources since the dawn of OpenStack, despite the heroic efforts of previous team members. An ambitious plan to further decentralize the Documentation team (and turn it into a guidance and mentoring support team) has been outlined. To be successful, this plan requires project teams to own their own documentation, which means that the role of documentation owners will be critical.
Volunteers for this role will in the short term drive this ambitious transition, by being members of their project team and members of the new decentralized documentation team. On the long-term they will become a reference go-to person in their project, and respected mentors in the OpenStack community.
Interested? Contact the Documentation PTL (asettle) or the TC sponsor for this item (dhellmann).
2. Glance Contributors
Glance is a service to manage images for OpenStack clouds. It's one of the early projects in OpenStack and it's deployed in almost every OpenStack cloud. Without Glance, Nova can't boot instances.
Glance is struggling to find new contributors that would be willing to provide reviews, to work on bugs or to work on new features. This struggle started as a result of the latest lay-offs that happened at the end of 2016 and beginning of 2017.
Glance is a great project to ramp up on OpenStack and it's a great project for developers regardless of their experience. Glance has welcomed interns, junior developers, and more senior developers. In every case, it's a great way to grow and contribute to OpenStack.
Glance is a critical project in OpenStack. Contributions to the future of the image registry are essential to the stability of OpenStack. More importantly, Glance is not "done". There's significant technical debt that needs to be taken care off and several features that can be implemented.
Interested? Join the Glance IRC channel (#openstack-glance) or reach out to the Glance PTL (rosmaita), the TC sponsor for this item (flaper87) or starting a new email thread on the ML using the tag [glance].
3. Community Infrastructure Sysadmins
The Infrastructure team is responsible for designing, building and maintaining the systems that are used in the day to day operation of the OpenStack project as a whole; this includes development, testing, and collaboration tools. All of the software it runs is open source, and under public configuration management so that everyone in the community has the opportunity to participate. One very effective way to get involved in OpenStack, gaining a deep understanding of and visibility within the community, is by helping operate this infrastructure. Attrition due to shifts in employment or availability of personal time impacts the team's ability to support the community effectively, and so there is a constant need for new contributors who can commit to investing sufficient effort to overcome the steep learning curve associated with these varied technologies.
Because our community is global, its support needs span most timezones. Unfortunately, the bulk of long-term contributors to Infrastructure are concentrated in the Americas and so this leaves APAC and EMEA community members with far fewer options for immediate assistance with urgent issues. Gaining more contributors who are active during those times (whether they live in those parts of the World or not) would provide a substantial benefit to the community. This is not necessarily as easy as it sounds because it's harder to get as much overlap with the current bulk of the team for shadowing and knowledge transfer, but there are still some existing team members in those timezones who can help mitigate that somewhat.
In particular, the team seeks developers and systems administrators with a background both in maintaining Unix/Linux servers and free software, and places heavy emphasis on systems automation and configuration management (primarily Ansible and Puppet at the moment). Everything possible goes through code review, and gets extensively documented and communicated with the rest of the community over IRC and mailing lists. Server resources are donated by companies operating OpenStack services, and the team also operates a persistent deployment of OpenStack too, so there is substantial opportunity both for people who have experience in those technologies as well as anyone wishing to gain more familiarity with them.
Join the #openstack-infra channel on the Freenode IRC network or reach out through the openstack-infra mailing lists on lists.openstack.org if you would like to get involved. It's a rewarding chance to learn and help others, but most of all it's fun!