Open Stack

The OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors held a telephone meeting on Tuesday August 6th at 9am PDT for about 2 hours. The Board spent a significant amount of time in the meeting discussing IP and patent strategies. Keith Bergelt from the Open Invention Network provided the Board members with an update on some of the work OIN has been doing to add additional packages to their expanded definitions, including some common OpenStack packages. Van Lindberg from the Legal Affairs Committee discussed a number of areas and approaches for cooperation among OpenStack member organizations concerning patents and IP.

Following these discussions there was a series of updates from different working groups and committees. I presented an update on plans for promoting training and certification as a follow on to the initial discussion in the June Board meeting. The Board voted to approve the proposals, and the Foundation staff and training working group will move forward to begin implementing programs to encourage training programs around the world. Tim Bell discussed some emerging plans the User Committee is making to expand the number of people who are working to gather and share feedback from OpenStack users. Tom Fifield, who is now a community manager with the Foundation will be assisting the existing committee members to help coordinate their activities. If you are an OpenStack user and you would like to be involved, please reach out to Tim Bell.

At the end of the meeting, there were several additional quick updates. Rob Hirschfeld presented an update on the ongoing discussions to define a framework to evaluate and define with projects would be part of OpenStack "core" over the long term. Todd Moore gave the Board notification that at the next Board meeting he expected to have some proposals around future election processes. Simon Anderson updated the Board on the state of the Gold Member Application Committee. Finally Alan Clark updated the Board on a recent Compensation Committee meeting.

As the next OpenStack Summit will now be in November instead of October, the Board scheduled another phone meeting for October 3rd at 9am Pacific time, followed by an in-person Board meeting in Hong Kong at the Summit.

Jonathan