Hello everyone,
My name is Pierre and I'm a proud OpenStacker since 3 years now. I'm not a dev, I'm a pure ops. For 3 years, my job has been to make OpenStack works, and everybody knows that it's a fulltime job.
I think my company do a lot for the OpenStack adoption in France. We are (a big) part of a french government project based on OpenStack. Today, production applications are running on OpenStack. It's the first private cloud in the french government.
We also work for one of the biggest retailer in the world, in a huge project OpenStack-based project. We are about 10 Ops folks working on these projects.
We spend a lot of time for the french OpenStack community, and we love it!
"We are OpenStack", but you know what, I don't really feel to be part of this "We". And I think I'm not the only ops folks feeling this.
Today, I'm booking flights for Austin. I'm happy to be able to attend every summit as I can afford flight tickets and hotel, with money earned from OpenStack jobs!
But I have to admit that I'm very very (very) very angry at the OpenStack foundation when I have to pay from $600 to $1000 my Summit tickets.
At the last summit, I went to the ambassador's session to speak about this. My point was that people spending time for the community should have an easier access to the summit by giving them "Active Community Contributors" Pass. The only answer I had was "If you can't afford the ticket, use the travel program".
No. That's not a good solution, because we don't want to beg for something we deserve! It's not a money issue, everything is about recognition. Also, there is a selection for admission. What kind of metrics are used to say yes or no? I think there is an easy solution, using local ambassadors to measure the events and talk to events organizer. There is not so many people...
Then, I went to the "feedback session" of the summit, and said that I was really involved in OpenStack, and I deserved an "Active Ops Contributor" badge. Everybody agreed. The ATC program is B.R.O.K.E.N.
My only solution? Make a bullshit commit, correct something in the docs, correct a typo in a comment… not very interesting. Here is one of my $1200 single character commit: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/20076/ . And this makes me an "Active Contributor" for two summits?? I know that there is no metric to measure Ops work for OpenStack project. If we use surveys, lots of OpenStack in production environments will suddenly appear by magic.
To be honest, I don't have a magic solution. I'm still thinking about it… If you have any idea, feel free.
We are all OpenStack, not only Developers. There is something like Dev <-> Users in the logo, right?
And what about people helping local user groups?