Hi All,

I would like to throw my hat in the ring to be part of the OpenStack Technical
Committee.

I'm working at Ericsson, where I'm coordinating the OpenStack related activities
across the company. I started to contribute to OpenStack more than two years ago
by adding rich query functionality to Ceilometer. Since then I got nominated as
a core reviewer in the project, where beyond other contributions, I became the
constant voice of usability aspects and backward compatibility. Among other
projects I'm contributing to Nova and OpenStack Manuals as well[1].

I would like to increase diversity in the TC group, but more importantly my
goal is to add fresh blood to the forum driving this community. In my
opinion it is very important to constantly revisit items from a different
perspective and let new voices articulate their views and ideas in order to see
the big picture. Long term this can ensure that OpenStack keeps its adaptability
to continue to be a smoothly functioning ecosystem just as being a stable and
successful software package.

In the course of my current role within Ericsson I encourage and follow the
contribution activities of my colleagues, by which I have a good oversight on
how OpenStack works as a community. Driven by my colleagues' and my own
experiences I see cross-project collaboration as an area, where notwithstanding
the already ongoing great work there is still room for further improvements. As
part of the TC I would like to participate in driving cross-project activities,
where I plan to focus on the on-boarding aspects. In my opinion it is very
important to spend time educating newcomers and helping to rapidly build up
competencies regarding processes likewise in the realm of technology and
coding abilities and guidelines. As part of this mission I would continue to
invest energy in bringing sessions on stage at the OpenStack Summits[2][3] to
share the lessons I learnt during the past two and a half years. It is key to
explain to people how the community really works beyond the well-documented
processes and tools that we are using every day. The devil is in the details, as
always.

I mentioned adaptability earlier, which I feel being a very important aspect as
it outlines the ability to constantly change when needed. In my view operating
OpenStack as Big Tent is a good approach, although I think it is important to
check the principles and review criteria to evaluate the new project
candidates to rationalize the current review process. I also got the impression
that the idea behind the tags is being devalued due to proliferation. I have
similar feelings regarding governance on project level. In my view it is very
important to give guidelines on how the teams can efficiently operate, but it is
time consuming and destroys the focus of the TC to spend much energy on giving
detailed descriptions and regulations on how these groups should work within
OpenStack. Among others I would like to revisit the aforementioned items to make
the responsibilities and activities of the TC more clear and make the group even
more efficient.

As an employee of a Telecom vendor I would like to bring in the NFV mindset to
OpenStack to be part of the daily discussions as opposed to being a mysterious
abbreviation that introduces competing priorities. During the past few years I
saw and experienced the difficulties and even pain of trying to find the common
language between the two groups and making the contributions happen. I think it
is very important to help the Telecom industry in the transformation to fit
into the cloud terminology and the open source era. By this process OpenStack
can leverage the advantages that this completely different set of priorities
and requirements could offer, such as increased stability and advanced
networking functionality.

I'm involved in OPNFV[4] and it is part of my mission to find the connection
points between the two communities[5] to build a large ecosystem which fits
OpenStack's current priorities[6] in the sense of actively supporting and being
the foundation for NFV. As a benefit for us we can use the test environment and
test frameworks to see how OpenStack operates in a fully integrated environment
on top of different hardware platforms. OPNFV brings integration and functional
testing to a different level which is an important feedback to our community and
a good checkpoint to our users. As more and more Telecom operators are looking
at OpenStack as a main building block of their systems, I would like to serve as
a representative in the technical driving force of OpenStack, who can operate as
a translator to build a common roadmap.

Thank you for reading through my thoughts. It is an honor to be part of
OpenStack, which is why I would like to take part in bringing this community
further to provide a package that can serve the whole industry and which is
backed up by a growing and smoothly functioning ecosystem.

Thank you for your consideration.

Best Regards,
/Ildikó (ildikov)


[1] http://stackalytics.com/?release=all&user_id=ildiko-vancsa&metric=person-day
[2] https://www.openstack.org/summit/openstack-paris-summit-2014/session-videos/presentation/tales-from-the-ship-navigating-the-openstack-community-seas
[3] https://www.openstack.org/summit/austin-2016/summit-schedule/events/8065
[4] https://www.opnfv.org
[5] https://www.openstack.org/summit/austin-2016/summit-schedule/events/7510
[6] http://www.openstack.org/assets/telecoms-and-nfv/OpenStack-Foundation-NFV-Report.pdf