[OpenStack Foundation] November 12 Board Meeting

Jonathan Bryce jonathan at openstack.org
Mon Nov 12 13:44:26 UTC 2018


Today, the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors met in person in Berlin with several directors also dialing in remotely. The agenda was posted on the wiki[1]. The Board meeting took place in the first portion of a full-day meeting that brought together the developer community leaders, user committee leaders and Board members for a joint leadership meeting.

At the beginning of the meeting, the Board approved several sets of minutes from past meetings that had happened earlier this year. These minutes will be posted to the wiki in the coming days.

Next, the OSF staff covered several items. The slides we covered are now linked on the wiki agenda page. First, we reviewed the status of the strategic project governance work that has been ongoing throughout the year. The Board then voted unanimously to approve the most recent iteration of the Bylaws amendments. This is the version that was previously circulated here on the foundation mailing list[2]. Following this approval, the Board updated the initial pilot project resolution from November 2017 to be inline with the new framework.

This is an exciting step in the work we’ve been taking on for over a year now as we move to support more and more open infrastructure collaboration in OpenStack and beyond. I want to thank everyone who has participated in the process and given us great feedback in 2017 and 2018. Next up, we will begin to communicate more broadly this week about the progress on these changes, especially as we head into the next step of finalizing these amendments.

Some of these changes will require additional approval by the different member classes of the Foundation (Individual, Gold and Platinum). The Platinum Members will vote on them in the coming weeks and the Gold and Individual Members will vote on the Bylaws as part of their 2019 Director elections in January.

We also covered some updates around the community and market as we head into the OpenStack Summit Berlin. There’s a lot of great data and information in the slides, but there were a few things that we wanted to specifically highlight. First, we’ve seen a lot of growth in adoption of ironic (in the user survey, it’s grown from being used in 9% of production deployments to 24% in the last 2 years), and want to make sure we’re giving OpenStack Bare Metal Clouds visibility as a very powerful open infrastructure tool. Second, we continue to see very high engagement in the OpenStack project with 70,000 merged changes in the last year. During the Rocky cycle, the community averaged 182 changes every day—that’s a very strong pace of progress. Third, we see big opportunities to continue down the path of building out a community oriented around open infrastructure, and research we’ve done this year shows that users see real benefits in having open choices throughout their stack, including flexibility and control, the ability to innovate quickly, and interoperable options to choose from.

After those updates, we previewed some of our early planning for 2019. We want to focus on strengthening OpenStack, especially the developer and user communities and have some specific programs we are looking at building out. We also talked about additional areas that we should be looking at for how we can better support use cases and our existing community. As part of this discussion, we talked about AI and machine learning as an area where we already see a lot of community activity. The Board then approved adding a strategic focus area for AI and machine learning to the existing areas. Finally, we had a brief discussion covering the finances of the Foundation and what potential evolution we might want to see as the scope of the OSF changes over the coming years. This is an item that will have more discussion and probably continue into next year. After this, Arkady Kanevsky gave an update from the Finance Committee to report that the committee has been meeting regularly and we are on track to meet our overall breakeven budget goal for the year.

Finally, the Board discussed and adopted several updated 2018.11 guidelines from the Interop Working Group (materials are linked on the wiki). After those items, the Board meeting officially closed and the remainder of the day was filled with updates from the OpenStack Technical Committee, the OpenStack User Committee, and leaders from each of the current four pilot projects.

The afternoon presentations for the leadership meeting are also linked on the wiki page and are worth looking through. Thanks to everyone who attended, and again especially all of you who participated in the strategic project work. We’ll continue many of these discussions through the week here in Berlin and I look forward to seeing many of you in person.

Jonathan


1. https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Governance/Foundation/12Nov2018BoardMeeting
2. http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/foundation/2018-November/002647.html


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