Open Stack

Hello Everyone,

Now that we've settled on a good baseline of what the mission of the Foundation will be, it's time to set down the details of how it will be organized to accomplish that mission. Over the past couple of months, we've talked to a variety of people involved in other foundations (in leadership positions and as developers on specific projects) as well as individuals and companies already involved in OpenStack. We now have a basic framework for review that we think fits with our mission and community. This framework is not exhaustive, and there are several open questions and details that we have purposefully not taken a stance on yet, such as the details of the Technical Committee. We are working on publishing a list of those questions and we'll post those to the list and discuss in the meetup next week.

http://wiki.openstack.org/Governance/Foundation/Structure

Going forward, we want to have another period of a few weeks where we have review and discussion in a variety of forums to revise the concepts that need to be part of the structure. At that point, we will be forming a Drafting Committee that will take the structure outline and framework and turn it into the legal documents needed to form the entity (Articles of Organization, Bylaws, Code of Conduct, Membership Agreements, etc). The Drafting Committee will primarily consist of lawyers from committed companies who can take our philosophical direction and turn it into cold, hard legalese. They will work in the open, publishing the draft documents they produce and soliciting feedback from the broader community.

As they complete the revision process and publish the final set of documents, there will be a ratification period during which members commit to the Foundation under the published documents. The documents will be considered ratified when a minimum number of Individual Members have joined and minimum level of funding is secured between Strategic Members and Corporate Sponsors. At that point, the entity will be set up, funds will be collected and a 60-day transition period will start where responsibilities are handed over from the existing structure to the new Foundation.

We've continued to fill out more of these details on the timeline to completion, and the schedule has been updated in the wiki on the main Foundation page: http://wiki.openstack.org/Governance/Foundation

Next week we're having a meetup in Sunnyvale on Wednesday at 4:30 PM. You can find the details at http://www.meetup.com/openstack/events/51553992/ . Looks like we should have a pretty good crowd there. We will also hold another set of webinars and will send out the details once those times are scheduled. If anyone has any suggestions on a better system for hosting the webinars that is cross-platform friendly, we'd love to hear it.

Jonathan
@jbryce
210-317-2438