Key contributors from 19 countries attended the recent OpenStack Summit in Austin. Find out how the Travel Support Program could be your ticket to Barcelona.

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The OpenStack Foundation funded the travel and hotel accommodations for 44 men and 16 women who are key contributors to attend the OpenStack Summit Austin.

The program will bring more folks to the Barcelona Summit. Here’s more on what recipients got out of the experience and how you can can participate.

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Winners of the Austin Summit travel support program.

"Because of this program, I had the great opportunity to meet Swift community members in people from around the world with whom I have been collaborating," says Jaivish Kothari of NEC Technologies India, who was also honored in Austin with a contributor award.
"I now have a better understanding in terms of areas that needs focus like features to be implemented for the next releases, Kubernetes integration with Openstack and many more, so that I can work in a more planned way to reach goals."

The Travel Support Program is based on the premise of Open Design, a commitment to an open design process that welcomes the public, including users, developers and upstream projects.

The program helps cover costs for travel and accommodation for key contributors to the OpenStack project to join the community at the Summits. That includes tireless volunteers like OpenStack Ambassador Marcelo Dieder, who says that "much of my activities with OpenStack are voluntary, and travel support program enabled my participation in the OpenStack Summit, allowing the participation of meetings with other global communities, and enabling the exchange of experience with several participants."

Rico Lin, chief OpenStack technologist at inwinStack made his first trip to the United States thanks to the Program. He took the keynote stage to present the winners in the first OpenStack Hackathon, which took place in Taiwan. The program is important to him "because it allows for a developer with limited resources like me to have equal opportunities to raise my voice and work with others during Design Summit." Lin adds that he met at least 100 people and would consider more than half of them new friends and OpenStack partners.

In all, there were 60 people accepted in the program from 19 different countries, spanning six continents breaking down into 14 people coming from India, 10 from Brazil, three from Africa and the remaining from Europe, Asia, Australia and the United States.

"Receiving the travel support meant a great deal to me because it allowed me to present my proposals on new upcoming features in the OpenStack projects I am involved with and raise important concerns on the design summit sessions that wouldn’t be possible otherwise," says Rodrigo Barbieri of Hitachi Data Systems, who traveled from Brazil. "Being there made all the difference, my local co-workers also had proposals and attempted to participate remotely and it just did not work well, so I carried forth their proposals so we could make the most of the Design Summit experience with the community."

Stay tuned to Superuser for details on Travel Support Applications for the April Summit in Barcelona.

Interested? Read these tips on how to successfully apply for Travel Support.
Former travel program participant Rossella Sblendido says one of those tips really made a difference in her application.

"Explain how you contributed in OpenStack, don’t be shy. Write about why it’s so important for you to take part in the summit. Be very specific and don’t forget to mention what your presence would bring to the community."

Cover Photo // CC BY NC

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