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Meet the newest members of the OpenStack Technical Committee

More on the seven new members of the TC.

May 4, 2018
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The OpenStack Technical Committee provides technical leadership for OpenStack as a whole. Responsibilities include enforcing OpenStack ideals (such as openness, transparency, commonality, integration and quality), deciding on issues that impact multiple programs, providing an ultimate appeals board for technical decisions and general oversight. It’s a fully-elected Committee that represents contributors to the project.

Made up of 13 directly elected members, the community hits refresh with partial elections every six months. There were 10 candidates for the seven spots open this round. While some have served on the TC before, we wanted to introduce them to the growing OpenStack community.

Here are the newly-elected members, in alphabetical order, with excerpts from their candidacy statements:

Zane Bitter, who works at Red Hat, has been working on OpenStack for six years, including as core contributor to and a former PTL for orchestration project Heat. “There are important discussions ahead — both within the technical community and between the TC and the Board — about where to draw the boundaries of OpenStack; the more user viewpoints that are represented, the better the result will be. We don’t get as much feedback from developers of cloud-aware applications as we do from other end users, because in many cases OpenStack doesn’t yet meet their minimum requirements. That is the gap I am hoping to bridge. If we succeed, OpenStack will not only gain a lot more users,but I expect more users will become contributors.”

Thierry Carrez is the vice-president of engineering at the OpenStack Foundation, helping ensure the long-term health of the OpenStack upstream open source project. A long-time elected member of the TC, he has been a Release Manager for the OpenStack project since its inception, coordinating the effort and facilitating collaboration between contributors. He previously served as elected chair of the OpenStack Technical Committee, which is in charge of the technical direction of the project.

Chris Dent, staff engineer at VMware who has been involved with OpenStack since 2014. (He also finds time to keep up a fantastic blog on the TC and the OSF community.) “The growth of projects under the OpenStack Foundation umbrella will present opportunities and challenges. We’ll be able to deal with those most effectively by having good communication hygiene: over communicating in a written and discoverable fashion. Changes in the shape of the community will impact the role of the TC and its members. The TC has been something of a high-level judiciary within the OpenStack technical community but increasingly will need to take on a role as a representative of the community that develops what has traditionally been known as “OpenStack” to the other nearby communities that are also now ‘OpenStack.’

Graham Hayes, who currently works at the Verizon Cloud Platform, has been contributing to OpenStack since the Havana cycle, mainly in Designate. “When it comes to pushing forward the TC vision, I think the community has made great steps forward to realizing it, on all but one section. We engage with groups like the CNCF, and specifically Kubernetes and help drive OpenStack adoption with first class support for the OpenStack Cloud Provider, the Cinder Container Storage Interface and other projects. We still need to find a way to show the world what a top tier private open source infrastructure of components like OpenStack, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry or OpenShift looks like and helping companies understand why this is the way forward for their infrastructure.”

Sean McGinnis, a re-elected member of the TC, is a principal architect with Huawei and OSF community member since the Icehouse release. “Outside of specific governance proposals, I’ve been working on getting involved in the operators community by attending the last few Ops Meetups to be able to get face to face with more of the folks actually using OpenStack. I’ve found it very valuable to hear directly about what kinds of issues are being run into and what kinds of things we might be able to change on the development side to make things better.

Mohammed Naser, founder CEO at VEXXHOST, a current Superuser Award nominee, has been an OSF community member since 2013. “I strongly believe that we have the most solid fundamental infrastructure software at the moment. However, I think that the focus should increase in working with other external communities which depend on infrastructure to increase our implementations. For example, working with Kubernetes in order to strengthen the cloud providers and perhaps get even more integration features such as auto-scaling. This will solidify OpenStack as the best set of infrastructure services in the market.”

Davanum Srinivas, a principal architect with Huawei, and returning TC member will be a familiar face to many in the OSF community.”While I have been on the TC long enough to be consider turning over the leadership role to other folks, I do feel like I have some unfinished business that I’d like to concentrate on for the next year. I spent quite a bit of time with things that use OpenStack and have a new appreciation for the challenges in the field and in practice. Just for example the need for a “validator” by our partners in CF illustrates the kind of challenges our users face. I would like to spend some time working / tackling these kinds of issues.”

So who gets a voice in these elections? All OSF individual members who authored a change to the official project teams repositories during the release time frame (for this round, it was previous two release cycles.) More on the process here, including how to get involved for next time.

“Having a good group of candidates helps engage the community in our democratic process,” says Foundation staffer Kendall Nelson, one of four election officials. “Thank you to all who voted and who encouraged others to vote. We need to ensure your voices are heard!”

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