Open Stack

Hi everyone,

A few weeks ago we published a draft mission statement for discussion and feedback. We had good responses on the foundation mailing list, during the webinars and in direct discussions with a number of people, including from many of the companies that have demonstrated strong support for OpenStack and others that are getting serious about committing. The number of meeting requests has been a bit overwhelming, but we are making as much time as possible to hear from everyone. This process has taken us past the original timeline, but I think it's worth it to build up as much support for OpenStack as possible. 

In general, there was a lot of consensus on the basic mission of the foundation, although there does seem to be a desire to revise the overall OpenStack mission. There was also some input that influences the structure more than the mission, and we'll be incorporating that into the next document that presents a high-level draft structure. Here's a summary of the major themes we saw on the mission:

* The foundation should work to protect the values of the OpenStack community, such as technical meritocracy
* Even though this is a very business-friendly project and community, make clear that we value the individuals who are contributing
* Some specific changes like mentioning testing resources and changing "compatibility" to "interoperability"

These changes were all incorporated and are included in the wiki: http://wiki.openstack.org/Governance/Foundation/Mission and you'll note that we removed the word "Draft", believing we are getting really close on this one and want to turn our attention to the big job of defining the structure. We can certainly continue to tweak the Mission, though.

One common theme was the desire to go back and adjust the original OpenStack Mission from July 2010.  We hadn't considered that a part of the exercise of defining the "Foundation Mission", but clearly it's on people's minds so I suggest we tackle that too as a separate work stream (Note that I removed it from the "Foundation Mission" page to keep it separate).  While many said that we should change it, there was not as much consensus about what the changes should be. Some people think it should explicitly be limited to infrastructure services, while others think it should be a broader vision that can be valid and stand the test of time. One approach may be to create a broad-based visionary mission that describes the general purpose of OpenStack and also include a short charter that sets out the specific focus of the community currently which can be reviewed and changed periodically.

Next up, we'll post a draft document that summarizes a proposed structure and look to get feedback on that. We'll also be holding a meetup Wednesday 2/15 at 4:30 near Cloud Connect. We'll publish the full details, including location, shortly on the meetup.  We will update the timeline on the wiki this week as well.  

Mark
@sparkycollier
cell:  512-791-0356