Open Stack

Excellent. Let's have an email discussion about whether Fox News is fair and balanced.  This will be productive :-) </troll>

Seriously, when reviewing the Individual Membership part of the bylaws we noticed that companies could "game" the system by telling all their employees to sign up.  This is a problem that we need to expose by social shaming -- which the script below will help do for us. Thank you!! I'd love to see a graph on the website itself. It's pretty interesting to see how many companies _appear to be_ "padding" the list (Not to call out anyone by name... Rackspace, HP, etc.).  

The bylaws suggest that individual members can be removed if they do not participate in at least 50% of the votes within a 24 month period.  This seems to be addressing the issue of padding the group with names of people who want to help their company, not the community. Two years is a forgiving filter, but then again, non-voters don't hurt anyone. On the other hand, there are going to be companies who are very invested in the community, and it's fair to expect them to be overrepresented.  Much like the US government has a house and senate (to represent based on raw population and based on votes per state). This foundation has multi-tiers -- and yet will skew toward corporate interests.  I don't have a problem with this, as long as participants are actively involved in helping foster the success of the community as a whole.  OpenStack is certainly skewing more corporate than other open source foundations.

In my case, I have encouraged the members of my company who are *directly* working on Open Stack related projects to join -- since it is their personal and professional passion.  We'll probably have about a dozen individuals give or take, maybe some more over time. These will be people who will actually invest their time and energy to the betterment of the OpenStack community on a regular and ongoing basis. 

I suggest that other companies encourage employee participation in a similar manner. Astroturfing, shilling, and hiring a claque to push corporate agendas is going to have to be shamed and shunned.

gil yehuda
director of open source and standards, Yahoo! Inc.
gyehuda at yahoo-inc.com | (408) 336-4857


-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Joyce [mailto:matt at nycresistor.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2012 11:57 AM
To: Duncan McGreggor
Cc: foundation at lists.openstack.org
Subject: Re: [OpenStack Foundation] Nomination Process Updates

> For those who are curious, I've pushed up an ugly hack to get some 
> basic stats one membership affiliations here:
>   https://gist.github.com/3229457

=/  not particularly happy with those numbers.  it's about as fair and balanced as fox news.

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