Hi everyone,

I'd like to submit my candidacy for election to the Technical Committee.
I use johnthetubaguy as my IRC nickname.

I was the Nova PTL for Liberty and Mitaka. I am currently employed by
Rackspace as a Principle Engineer, working as an upstream developer.
Since late 2010 I have had a variety of OpenStack related roles. I started
building a OpenStack private cloud deployment tool at Citrix, then moved to
working upstream but focusing on making XenServer work well with OpenStack.
In early 2013 I moved to Rackspace, doing development for Rackspace's public
cloud, and more recently looking across all of Rackspace's OpenStack
contributions. I believe this variety of different experience helps me better
represent all of the OpenStack technical community.

1. User Experience, Ecosystem and Interoperability

As we evolve OpenStack, I think we must always look towards delivering what
our users really need from OpenStack as a whole.

Our users need a healthy ecosystem of tools and applications to make OpenStack
really useful to them. To deliver this we need truly useful interoperability.

DefCore is helping, but we need to focus more on improving, rather than just
enforcing, interoperability.

2. Ecosystem, not just one tent

There is a lot of talk about tents and festivals. As we step back and look
again at the limits of the tent. I think we should focus on supporting a
vibrant ecosystem, that contains various groups of very useful tools.
The original concerns have not gone away, but I think we are now in a position
to make a different set of trade offs.

We should focus our attention on helping users understand and navigate the
ecosystem. We can use things like the project tags as rewards. Users can
help keep folks honest. Ideally an ecosystem that is a kind of meritocracy.
I feel it this must be Open to tools built "outside of OpenStack".

Just how each project has a clear mission, it feels like it could be useful
to have various groups of projects that join together behind a shared mission.
The current set of "defcore projects" feels like one possible group.

I don't claim to have the answers, but I would like us to help find a solution
that better supports all of our ecosystem, but ideally also allows for more
focus on problems users need solving.

3. Improve collaboration, across the globe

There are lots of difficult OpenStack problems that our users need solving
but we are not making progress. We need to think more about OpenStack as a
whole rather than a collection of independent projects.

We should build consensus on the most important issues that our users need
solved, and tell people. We then need to work on getting developers
"permission" to work on those items. A related example is the product working
group looking at how to get developers they can help more time for reviews,
bug triage, etc.

Evolving the Design Summit is an important part of improving our
collaboration. Going back to permission, as a community we need to make clear
the importance of contributors meeting face to face to establish and maintain
the relationships we all need to stay productive. Code reviews are so much
easier when you have met the person commenting on your work.

Being in the UK, meeting times designed for folks in the west coast of the US
can really suck, but I know other parts of the globe have an even harder time.
I have seen staggering synchronous meetings, regular (6 monthly) in person
meetings, along with asynchronous tools like gerrit to record decisions work
well at supporting a global community. Lets keep ensuring we keep the
community Open to folks around the globe.


Thank you for reading!

John Garbutt (johnthetubaguy)