On September 18, the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors met via conference call. The agenda was posted on the wiki[1]. Almost all of the content meeting followed from presentations in a deck that is attached to this email as a PDF or available on Google Slides[2]. The meeting started out with an update from Lauren Sell on the state of the OpenStack market, including some recent data from analysts, as well as some data from the latest user survey that we are in the process of putting together. She also highlighted some new public user stories and case studies and provided some details about the state of the OpenStack public cloud global footprint. She then presented about the latest OpenStack software release, Rocky, some quick updates on the 4 OSF pilot projects, and a preview of the upcoming OpenStack “Open Infrastructure” Summit in Berlin. Finally she covered some activities underway right now, including opening an office in Shanghai, China and hiring our first full-time Chinese staff member, updates to the OpenStack website, and some content production that is being done in the community around HA and hybrid clouds. If you are interested in participating in the content process, contact Allison Price (allison@openstack.org). The slide deck also contains summaries of a dozen use cases for reference (pp. 30-33). After the initial update, Thierry Carrez and I dove into an update on the OSF open infrastructure project expansion and governance discussion. We went through a quick summary of the history of this initiative, which we kicked off last year as part of the community wide strategic review. I posted an update a few weeks ago to this list on the state of those discussions[3], and the presentation covered much of the same ground with additional detail and discussion of a few points. The goal was to get general agreement on the high level framework so that we can move forward with drafting up the necessary documents to implement a more formal and permanent structure for considering additional projects, as well as a confirmation process for our existing pilot projects. We had some good discussion and will be moving forward with several next steps, including holding a community meeting in the next few weeks, beginning to draft some Bylaws updates (we’ll post those to this list), and scheduling an additional Board call for October. Next, Mark Collier talked about some updates to the sponsorship and funding options for the OSF as we include additional projects. One of our goals is to minimize overhead and duplication, provide additional value to existing members, and open up the possibility to provide ongoing funding to new projects that come on. Mark presented two phases for feedback and input. The first phase takes our existing OpenStack project corporate sponsorship model and opens it up to other projects we’re hosting. For Foundation corporate members (Gold and Platinum members) they would be able to show their support for any project without paying additional fees. This model is targeted at the ongoing project-specific funding and leaves room for additional start up funding that may be useful to help with initial launch expenses. Phase one received general consensus and we’ll be moving forward with that. The second phase proposes the possible creation of a Silver corporate membership tier that could be desirable for companies who want to support multiple OSF projects, but do not necessarily want to join at the Gold or Platinum level. One major different from Gold and Platinum membership is that it would not have specific member class representation on the Board like the Individual, Platinum and Gold classes. There was quite a bit of discussion around this corporate membership option and most people agreed we needed to discuss it more. We wrapped up the meeting with a brief overview of some brand research we have been doing with an outside firm to try to gain a better understanding of the perception of OpenStack in the marketplace, see how people viewed foundations and their role in the open source landscape and where we could best help, and see if the “open infrastructure” concept is resonating as we start to use it more. We will be doing a deeper dive into this research in a couple of weeks with our outside experts (we’ll probably post the invite to the marketing list if you’re interested in following along). It was a packed meeting with a lot of content, but I feel like we had some very good discussions. I also noticed we had strong observer attendance on the call, so thanks to everyone who took the time to dial in and follow along. Feel free to reach out to me with any questions or comments. Thanks, Jonathan 1. https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Governance/Foundation/18Sep2018BoardMeeting 2. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10UyCpxkjPqC3kT-dYRpBxzNT39i2OhlggJvz... 3. http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/foundation/2018-August/002617.html