OpenStack Governance Election Process

As I stated in my earlier OpenStack Governance post, I am following up with the details for the election process. Please send me any thoughts you have on this process so I can ensure that everyone in the community is aware of the process and tools being used. I am presenting details on the four separate elections being run as each election has different requirements based on the OpenStack governance policy .

The elections will run from March 21, 2011 thru April 1, 2011 at Midnight CST. Final results will be posted first thing in the morning on April 4, 2011 when I get into the office on the OpenStack blog (http://openstack.org/blog), within the CIVS (see below) election system tool, and via an email to the OpenStack developer mailing list.

NOVA Project Team Lead (1 Position)

Voter Eligibility – Only OpenStack community members who have successfully submitted code to the NOVA project are eligible to be nominated or vote.  I am using the list of email addresses found at http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~hudson-openstack/nova/trunk/view/head:/Authors for eligible electors and nominees. Each member of this list will receive an email with a direct link to the NOVA PTL team lead election site where they can vote for the member of their choice. Each member can only vote once in this election.

SWIFT Project Team Lead (1 Position)

Voter Eligibility – Only OpenStack community members who have successfully submitted code to the SWIFT project are eligible to be nominated or vote.  I am using the list of email addresses found at http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~hudson-openstack/swift/trunk/view/head:/AUTHORS for eligible electors and nominees. Each member of this list will receive an email with a direct link to the NOVA PTL team lead election where they can vote for the member of their choice. As this list only has author names, I will be reaching out to several members whose email I do not have; of course, if you are on the list you can simply send me your email address to save me time in searching out your contact information. Each member of this list will receive an email with a direct link to the SWIFT PTL team lead election site where they can vote for the member of their choice. Each member can only vote once in this election.

GLANCE Project Team Lead (1 Position)

Voter Eligibility – Only OpenStack community members who have successfully submitted code to the GLANCE project are eligible to be nominated or vote. At this time, the following developers are authorized to vote or be nominated for this position:

Rick Harris – Cory Wright – Chris MacGown – Vishvananda Ishaya – Monty Taylor – Jay Pipes

If you believe that you should be on the GLANCE list, please email before March 19th as I will be sending out election links on March 21st.

Each member of this list will receive an email with a direct link to the GLANCE PTL team lead election site where they can vote for the member of their choice. Each member can only vote once in this election.

Project Policy Board (2 Open Positions)

Voter Eligibility – Any registered member of the OpenStack Launchpad is eligible to run or be nominated for one of the two positions. I am getting this list of authorized voters and nominees from the Launchpad system at https://launchpad.net/~openstack. Based on current numbers, there are 632 people eligible to vote or be nominated.

PTL Member Wins 1 of 2 Slots – Based on the governance policy, if either of the two top vote getters are also winners in the PTL election, then the next highest person on the election results will be declared the winner. From the governance policy:

If an individual should happen to be elected as both a PTL and General Member of the PPB, then they will take their PTL seat only and the elected General Member seat will go to the next highest vote getter

The Condorcet Internet Voting System (see below) leverages ranked choices thereby making the possibility of a tie extremely unlikely. If a tie does occur, a runoff between the two candidates who tied will be held.

ELECTION TOOL

For all four of the elections, we will use the Condorcet Internet Voting Service from Cornell University, see http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/civs.html. This tool uses the Condorcet method of voting which invokes ranking the nominees instead of just selecting one choice. More information on this methodology is at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/civs/rp.html.

All registered voters will receive an email with a unique link allowing them to privately vote.

For the Project Advisory Board election, in order to collect voters email addresses I will contact every potential voter using the “Contact this team’s members” feature at https://launchpad.net/~openstack and ask them to reply directly to me using their preferred voting email address if they want to participate in the vote.

Please note that the voting system is run using private polls with restricted access to ensure voter authenticity; however all results will be made public once the election ends. The only delay in posting results will be due to me not being awake when the elections end at midnight.

TRIAL RUN
I am planning to run a trial of this tool on March 17 and anyone wishing to take part in the trial can email me and I will include you in the voting trial.

As is standard, please contact me with any questions you have on the voting process, nomination process, governance policy or any other issue in the OpenStack community,

Tags:

OpenStack Conference / Design Summit : Announcing Service Provider Track

I am pleased to announce the confirmation of a new track at the OpenStack Conference / Design Summit next month on April 26 – 29, 2011. Bernard Golden, CEO of HyperStratus, virtualization and cloud blogger on CIO.com, and author of “Virtualization for Dummies” has agreed to host a unique track for service providers deploying or planning to deploy an OpenStack cloud based on OpenStack Compute and OpenStack Object Storage. This track has confirmed speakers from KT, Cloudscaling, and Mach Technologies along with a roundtable discussion hosted by Bernard to further engage the service provider community in best practices for going to market with OpenStack.

The current agenda for this track is listed below:

  • OpenStack Clouds, Bernard Golden (HyperStratus)
  • Delivering OpenStack Object Storage to the People, Jaesuk Ahn (KT) and Andrew Shafer (Cloudscaling)
  • Integrated Managed Services NG Stack via OpenStack,  Paul Pettigrew (CEO, Mach Technology )
  • Commercialization of OpenStack Object Storage, Joe Arnold (Cloudscaling)
  • Group Discussion on Service Provider Plans and Initiatives Leveraging OpenStack hosted by Bernard Golden

Event registration for the OpenStack Conference / Design Summit is here. I look forward to this track at the upcoming event as OpenStack moves from the development to deployment phase.

Tags:

Community Weekly Newsletter (March 5 – March 11)

OpenStack Community Newsletter – March 11, 2011

This weekly newsletter is a way for the community to learn about all the various activities occurring on a weekly basis. If you would like to add content to a weekly update or have an idea about this newsletter, please email [email protected].

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS (3/4– 3/10)

  • Data Tracking Graphs – http://wiki.openstack.org/WeeklyNewsletter
  • OpenStack Compute (NOVA) Data
    • 24 Active Reviews
    • 181 Active Branches – owned by 50 people & 10 teams
    • 2,070 commits by 61 people in last month
  • OpenStack Object Storage (SWIFT) Data
    • 6 Active Reviews
    • 50 Active Branches – owned by 19 people & 4 teams
    • 208 commits by 12 people in last month
  • Twitter Stats for Week:  #openstack 168 tweets; 172 re-tweets; all OpenStack total tweets
  • Bugs Stats for Week:  315 Tracked Bugs; 57 New Bugs; 32 In-process Bugs; 7 Critical Bugs; 39 High Importance Bugs; 133 Bugs (Fix Committed)
  • Blueprints Stats for Week:  164 Blueprints; 6 Essential, 13 High, 24 Medium, 22 Low, 100 Undefined
  • OpenStack Website Stats for Week: 11,450 Visits, 26,187 Pageviews, 59.90% New Visits
    • Top 5 Pages: Home 41.96%; /projects 11.93%; /projects/compute 17.68%; /projects/storage 11.77%; /Community 6.55%

OPENSTACK IN THE NEWS

Tags:

OpenStack Developer Activity (March 4 – March 11)

Many people have asked for more insight into the developer activities for OpenStack as the large number of code changes and proposals make it difficult to monitor everything happening. In hopes of exposing more of the developer activities, I plan to post a weekly or biweekly blog post on the latest development activities. If you have any ideas for this blog post, please email me at [email protected]. I am always ready to listen to the community for new ideas.

Activities

Developer Mailing List (archive: https://lists.launchpad.net/openstack/)

This is select list of topics discussed this week in the developer mailing list and is not a complete list.  Please visit the archive to see all the topics.

  • Returning the project for resources in the EC2 API – Ryan Lane suggested a way to know which resource is in which project.  He is looking for a way to add the project information to the EC2 API in a consistent way.  Jay Pipes suggested that the authn/authz will try to solve this but it will be post Cactus. Justin Santa Barbara suggested three solutions and is looking at doing the following – support filtering.
  • Distributed Scheduler blueprint update – Ed Leafe updated the specification for the Distributed Scheduler blueprint at http://wiki.openstack.org/DistributedScheduler. Ksankar responded with some questions and an offer to assist. Justin Santa Barbara then responded with more optimization ideas and thoughts; see them at https://lists.launchpad.net/openstack/msg01328.html.
  • Queue Service Implementation Thoughts – Eric Day provided some testing measurements of using Erlang REST framework versus Python and presented the results. Eric is looking for feedback from the community on using Python instead of Erland. Several developers including ksankar, Thierry Carrez, John Purrier, Curtis Carter, and Sandy Walsh all responded with more discussion. See the complete thread at https://lists.launchpad.net/openstack/msg01301.html.

Statistics

  • Number of OpenStack Developers on Contributors List – 154 (+1 for week)
  • Cactus Release Status – Blueprints (http://wiki.openstack.org/releasestatus/)
    • Essential – 5 Design Approved; 3 Implemented – 1 Needs Code Review – 1 Good Progress
    • High – 11 Blueprints; 5 Implemented – 2 Slow Progress – 1 Started – 1 Not Started – 2 Deferred
    • Medium – 22 Blueprints; 5 Needs Code Review; 6 Implemented – 1 Beta Available – 2 Good Progress – 3 Started – 3 Not Started – 2 Deferred
    • Low – 15 Blueprints; 6 Implemented – 1 Needs Code Review; 2 Started – 5 Not Started – 1 Deferred
    • Undefined – 1 Implemented

For the latest on development activities on OpenStack please check these sites for more details:

Tags:

OpenStack Conference/Design Summit Registration is Open

The OpenStack community is proud to announce the opening of registration for our April 26-29, 2011 Design Summit conference in Santa Clara, CA at the Hyatt Regency. Confirmed speakers for the first 2 days of the event include NASA, Wikimedia, eBay, Intel, Citrix, Cloudscaling, GigaSpaces, KT, Gluster, Scalr, Arista Networks, Mach Technology, Rackspace, and Hyperstratus with the distance award to Paul Pettigrew the CEO of Mach Technology from Brisbane, Australia. Please register for the event here.

All attendees will pay $100 to attend the event to assist in covering the various fees required to put on a 4 day event. If you are a college student and interested in attending for no charge, please contact me for special registration instructions.

I would also like to thank the sponsors from Autonomic Resources, Cisco, Citrix, Cloudscaling, Intel, Nicira Networks, and NTT Data for generously supporting this community event. Sponsorship opportunities are still available for companies interested in assisting the community in hosting this event.

Tags:

OpenStack Project Techncial Leads (PTLs)

From Thierry Carrez:

I’d like to quickly precise what will be expected, from a release management perspective, from the Project Technical Leads (PTLs) some of us will nominate and elect in the following weeks.

PTLs, like it says on the tin, will have to technically lead each project. That comes with a few rights, but also with a lot of duties that the candidates shouldn’t underestimate…

Rights include the ability to decide between conflicting opinions on a technical debate, or the authority to set the theme for the next release. Exercising those rights will only be possible if the technical opinions of the elected lead are widely respected in the project.

Duties of the PTLs, from a release management perspective, mainly include coming up with a plan for the next release(s). That means staying on top of what everyone proposes, selecting (and rejecting) blueprints for a given cycle, setting priorities, approving designs (potentially with the help of other project drivers), or making sure we don’t duplicate work. The PTLs should also be very impacted by the design summit preparation, making sure we have sessions for what we need to discuss, and encouraging people to submit corresponding blueprints.

As release manager, I can help with the process, but the decisions must come from the PTLs, who have the legitimacy of being elected. During the cycle, I will then help in making sure the defined plan is on track.

With a well-established project like Swift or a relatively-small project like Glance, the PTL work can certainly be done at the same time as regular development. For Nova however, the PTL should expect project coordination work to take a large part of his time, so he could find himself not being able to write as much code as he would want. That should be kept in mind before you accept nominations.

Hoping this helps in clarifying expectations… Happy nominating and voting !

Tags:

OpenStack Governance Nominations and Election Process

As stated in Jonathan Bryce’s OpenStack Governance Update last week, the OpenStack governance process has been modified to better serve the community and include additional community-elected leaders. This blog post details the nomination and election process for the open positions detailed in Jonathan’s post.

PROCESS

Nominations – Starting Tuesday March 8th thru March 18th at Midnight CST any person interested in one of the available positions and meeting the requirements (see below) can either self-nominate or be nominated for an open position. All nomination requests should be sent via email to [email protected] and include the following information:

  • Name of person being nominated including email address
  • Position posting for (PTL NOVA, PTL SWIFT, PTL GLANCE, PPB GENERAL)
  • Company name (individual developers can just put Independent)

All nominated and qualified people will be added to a public Etherpad at http://etherpad.openstack.org/Spring2011-Elections.

Elections – Starting Monday March 21 thru April 1 at Midnight CST all nominated people will be put into an online election system for community voting. Each position open for election has unique requirements for eligibility to vote thus four separate elections will be held at the same time. Details on the election process are still in review and planning; however, information on the process will be posted before the election system is activated.

Results – On April 4, 2011 the final voting results will be published to the community on the OpenStack blog at http://openstack.org/blog.

POSITIONS

Please review the descriptions of the available positions at http://wiki.openstack.org/Governance/Model to better understand the commitments involved. These are significant leadership positions within the OpenStack community and your contributions via these positions will have a large impact on the overall project. Here are some additional points to be aware of for these positions:

  • Approve and prioritize blueprints for releases, communicate roadmap
  • Coordinate the technical sessions at the design summit that occurs after their elections
  • Resolve any deadlocked conflicts in the community
  • Work with the release manager to ensure releases stay on track and status is communicated broadly
  • Implement project-specific policies such as choosing subject matter experts, code review policies
  • Participate in the #openstack IRC channel and developer mailing lists

The following positions are available for the election process:

Project Technical Leads PTL Nova, PTL Swift, and PTL Glance

OpenStack is currently designating the following three projects – Nova, Swift, and Glance as requiring a separate project technical lead. Other projects within OpenStack will work with the Project Policy Board to determine needs for a technical lead.

Requirements – From the OpenStack Governance Model:

Anyone who has submitted code which has been accepted into the respective project’s trunk is eligible to run for a PTL seat, and to vote for the PTL. Sitting Project Technical Leads are eligible to run for re-election each cycle, provided they continue to meet the criteria.

Project Policy Board General Board Seat A, General Board Seat B
Requirements – From the OpenStack Governance Model:

Any registered member of an OpenStack Launchpad group is eligible to run and vote in these elections. The TWO individuals receiving the most votes will assume these seats. If an individual should happen to be elected as both a PTL and General Member of the PPB, then they will take their PTL seat only and the elected General Member seat will go to the next highest vote getter.

If you have any questions on this process, please contact [email protected] who is managing nominations and elections for these positions.

Tags: