Hi all, Welcome to the topic selection process for our Forum in Sydney. If you've participated in an ops meetup before, this should seem pretty comfortable. If not, note that this is not a classic conference track with speakers and presentations. OpenStack community members (participants in development teams, working groups, and other interested individuals) discuss the topics they want to cover and get alignment on and we welcome your participation. The Forum is for the entire community to come together, to create a neutral space rather than having separate "ops" and "dev" days. Sydney marks the start of the Rocky release cycle, where ideas and requirements will be gathered. Users should aim to come armed with feedback from Augusts's Pike release if at all possible. We aim to ensure the broadest coverage of topics that will allow for multiple parts of the community getting together to discuss key areas within our community/projects. There are two stages to the brainstorming: 1. Starting today, set up an etherpad with your group/team, or use one on the list and start discussing ideas you'd like to talk about at the Forum. Then, through mailing list discussion work out which ones are the most needed - just like you did prior to the ops events. 2. Then, in a couple of weeks, we will open up a more formal web-based tool for submission of abstracts that came out of the brainstorming on top. Make an etherpad, or use one from the list at: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Forum/Sydney2017 One key thing we'd like to see is collaboration between every area of ther community. Find an interested development project or three and share to your ideas. Think about what kind of session ideas might end up as: Project-specific, cross-project or strategic/whole-of-community discussions. There'll be more slots for the latter two, so do try and think outside the box! This part of the process is where we gather broad community consensus - in theory the second part is just about fitting in as many of the good ideas into the schedule as we can. Further details about the forum can be found at: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Forum Thanks! Jimmy McArthur on behalf of the OpenStack Foundation and User Committee