Hi everyone, I wanted to give you a quick update on an exciting new initiative OSF is supporting. OpenInfra Labs (OILabs) is the new effort we've been gradually working to establish in partnership with the Mass Open Cloud <https://massopen.cloud/> (MOC) community. MOC is a well established group that involves five of the top research universities in the world: Boston University, Harvard, MIT, Northeastern and University of Massachusetts. MOC has three interrelated goals: operating a production cloud, enabling more production clouds to be built and enabling industry innovation. OILabs is created with the further goal to expand the existing community and simplify and standardize how different institutions deploy and operate open source cloud and cloud native infrastructure software. Initially, the project will prioritize the needs of the MOC. Longer term the goal is to see more organizations globally (especially in the academic and research space) stand up multiple consistent clouds that can enable hybrid and federated use cases. The MOC group runs several large cloud environments that are used by thousands of users across the participating universities as well as through a Massachusetts startup initiative. They have created tools to do a lot of this and would like to open them up and collaborate more with other universities and public clouds. They are also big believers in OpenStack and want it to become easier to use in academic and research environments so that people don't just choose hyperscale public clouds or proprietary software options. OILabs aligns with OSF’s priorities in a few ways: It's a very direct attempt to improve usability and viability of the core OpenStack services. It also creates OpenStack marketing opportunities through new use cases. It's also a direct attempt to integrate OpenStack with K8s and other key open source infrastructure software, especially within the academic market. The MOC previously had involvement with a number of our member and sponsor companies, including Red Hat, Intel, NetApp, Dell, Cisco, Fujitsu and Mellanox, so it’s already strategically aligned across the OSF ecosystem. So what's next with OILabs? We’ve set up some basic collaboration channels and pushed a landing page: https://openinfralabs.org/ <https://openinfralabs.org/>. Next week, March 2-3, the MOC community is hosting an Open Cloud Workshop <https://massopen.cloud/events/2020-open-cloud-workshop/> at Boston University that covers several open efforts. OSF will be participating by attending the workshop and community leaders including Mohammed Naser, Julia Kreger and Jonathan Bryce are also leading a few sessions. The full schedule of keynotes, talks, deep dives and BoF sessions is available here <https://massopen.cloud/events/2020-open-cloud-workshop/#Schedulenbsp>. As we look into 2020, OSF will focus efforts on helping OILabs collaborate in the open, giving their efforts more visibility, and helping to raise funding for these efforts with an eye towards it becoming an OSF Pilot Project. If you want to get involved in any of these areas, please let us know. Thanks, Claire