Hi all, Welcome to the topic selection process for our Forum in Berlin. This is not a classic conference track with speakers and presentations. OSF community members (participants in development teams, operators, working groups, SIGs, and other interested individuals) discuss the topics they want to cover and get alignment on and we welcome your participation. The Forum is your opportunity to help shape the development of future project releases. For OpenStack Berlin marks the beginning of Stein’s release cycle, where ideas and requirements will be gathered. We should come armed with feedback from August's Rocky 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. For OSF Projects (StarlingX, Zuul, Airship, Kata Containers) Welcome! Berlin is your first official opportunity to participate in a Forum. The idea is to gather ideas and requirements for your project’s upcoming release. Look to https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Forum for an idea of how to structure fishbowls and discussions for your project. The idea is to ensure the broadest coverage of topics, while allowing for the project community to discuss critical areas of concern. To make sure we are presenting the best topics for discussion, we have asked representatives of each of your projects to help us out in the Forum selection process. There are two stages to the brainstorming: 1. Starting today, set up an etherpad with your team and start discussing ideas you'd like to talk about at the Forum and work out which ones to submit. 2. Then, in a couple of weeks, we will open up a more formal web-based tool for you to submit abstracts for the most popular sessions that came out of your brainstorming. Make an etherpad and add it to the list at: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Forum/Berlin2018 This is your opportunity to think outside the box and talk with other projects, groups, and individuals that you might not see during Summit sessions. Look for interested parties to collaborate with and share your ideas. Examples of typical sessions that make for a great Forum: Strategic, whole-of-community discussions, to think about the big picture, including beyond just one release cycle and new technologies e.g. OpenStack One Platform for containers/VMs/Bare Metal (Strategic session) the entire community congregates to share opinions on how to make OpenStack achieve its integration engine goal Cross-project sessions, in a similar vein to what has happened at past forums, but with increased emphasis on issues that are of relevant to all areas of the community e.g. Rolling Upgrades at Scale (Cross-Project session) – the Large Deployments Team collaborates with Nova, Cinder and Keystone to tackle issues that come up with rolling upgrades when there’s a large number of machines.
 Project-specific sessions, where community members most interested in a specific project can discuss their experience with the project over the last release and provide feedback, collaborate on priorities, and present or generate 'blue sky' ideas for the next release e.g. Neutron Pain Points (Project-Specific session) – Co-organized by neutron developers and users. Neutron developers bring some specific questions about implementation and usage. Neutron users bring feedback from the latest release. All community members interested in Neutron discuss ideas about the future. 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 all! Jimmy McArthur, on behalf of the OpenStack Foundation, User Committee & Technical Committee