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.