I’d like to also toss my name into the ring. I’m announcing my candidacy for a
position on the OpenStack Technical Committee.

-- About me
I have served as the Keystone PTL for the Mitaka and Newton cycles, and will
again serve as the PTL for the Ocata cycle. I’ve also contributed heavily to
python-openstackclient in it’s early days, where I am remain an active
core-reviewer. I am also a core member in a few Oslo projects (oslo.cache and
oslo.policy) and OpenStackClient projects (os-client-config and cliff). I’ve
contributed reviews and patches to many repos over my time -- ranging from
devstack, infra, python-*client, openstack-manuals, you name it!

I’ve been contributing to OpenStack since early 2013, as part of a small group
of IBMers dedicated to working entirely upstream. I can happily say that I
continue this same role today. Most of my work on OpenStack has been focused
on making Keystone and OpenStack more enterprise ready while trying to improve
usability and manageability of OpenStack.

-- Bracing for the Big Crunch
The explosive growth that occurred as a result of the Big Tent was expected and
phenomenal. I believe the decision brought great innovation, accelerated
adoption at a time when it was needed, and allowed competing projects to
co-exist. A natural reaction to such growth is unfortunately, a leveling off or
contraction phase. We already saw hints of this in the last round of PTL
elections [1] . I believe this trend will continue. This is OK and completely
natural, the strongest projects will continue to survive. We have seen this
pattern in many other technologies. The TC should be prepared for this
eventuality, and set minimum standards that projects should meet (not unlike
what is proposed by the OpenStack-wide goals).

-- Organizing the Big Tent
The big tent lumped all the projects together in an unorganized way, take a
quick look at the list [2]. I believe this has been a large source of confusion
to the end consumer. There are projects that a consumer would never deploy
(docs, infra, etc), there are projects that a consumer will use one of
(openstack-ansible, puppet, chef, etc), these logical groupings go on. We don't
provide enough guidance on which sets of projects are good groupings to
consider using together. It is critical for the OpenStack community to reduce
the adoption pains experienced by our consumers. Everything can live in the
big tent, but let’s make the big tent a bit more organized.

-- Let’s get Opinionated
I also believe OpenStack needs to be a bit more opinionated. We have a bad
habit of trying to please everyone, and I’d like for that to stop. We’ll end up
pleasing nobody at all. We don’t need more optional features, we need to pay
down technical debt. We need to focus on OpenStack-wide goals that create a
more consistent project that is focused and more consumable; improving the
quality of OpenStack as a whole. This is something I will be enforcing in the
Ocata cycle for Keystone, and I encourage others to do the same.

-- Creating OpenStack-wide goals
OpenStack is mature, it’s now 6 years old. It’s (past?) time we tackle the hard
issues at an OpenStack-wide level. I'd like to see the TC focus on goals that
not only increase adoption of OpenStack but also make OpenStack easier to
manage and help to improve our ability to have new consumers of OpenStack stick
with OpenStack. I believe the key to this success is to work closely with our
operator friends. Having the Project Team Gathering (PTG) [3] will help get the
right folks in the room to talk about the important issues.

Working on OpenStack has brought me a great deal of fun and joy. I look forward
to working on OpenStack in any capacity and would be honored to be on the TC.

Thanks for reading,
Steve

Stackalytics: http://stackalytics.com/?user_id=stevemar
Foundation Profile: https://www.openstack.org/community/members/profile/8430
Freenode: stevemar
Twitter: https://twitter.com/stevebot

[1] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-September/104170.html
[1] https://governance.openstack.org/reference/projects/index.html
[2] https://www.openstack.org/ptg/