Hi Everyone,

I'd like to submit my candidacy for second term on the OpenStack Technical
Committee. I have been proud to serve the community over this last year.


Getting stuff done
------------------

I have lots of hope for the new TC vision. I believe it will bring a renewed
sense of urgency and unity in what we as a community need to work on:

* https://review.openstack.org/453262

I look forward to the discussion with the whole community on the proposed
vision, and look forward to working towards turning that vision into
reality. In particular, I think we are getting closer to building consensus
around the question of "What is OpenStack?"


A Diverse Global Community
--------------------------

I plan not to attend the TC's IRC meetings, at least not at a time ouside
my normal working hours.

The last year it has been a struggle to attend the 8pm/9pm meeting. I know
many people make bigger sacrifices to regularly attend IRC meetings, but that
should not be normal or acceptable. We need to learn new ways of interacting
that don't require such sacrifices. In a similar way, I believe that people
that don't work full time on OpenStack should still be able to play an active
role in the technical leadership of OpenStack.

I am proud to be part of a diverse global community. We need to keep working
hard to keep it that way. I hope to help with that.


Feedback loops
--------------

While speaking to some HPC users in Cambridge recently, we were complimented
on how welcoming the OpenStack community is to users and operators. In
particular, how much better things are now compared to two/three years ago.
I am keen we continue to build on this progress.

I am working on ways the operator and user communities become more actively
involved in development process. The VM and baremetal working group is a
attempt to try a concept a constellation of projects work together (rather
than individual projects working in isolation) gather feedback from users,
develop proposals on how to fix problems together, and set priorities on what
are the most important things to fix. Seems worth a try.

I am keen to get specific representatives from the operator and user community
to volunteer to work closely with the development teams on particular features
that interest them. This relationship can help build bridges between the
respective communities, helping keep both communities up to speed on how things
are progressing. I have seen this close collaboration work for some features
in Nova, but I would like to see us make better use of it for wider reaching
problems that affect multiple projects.

I also believe we need to be clearer about how are users are and which ones
we are in touch with regularly. Some projects actually have users within our
community, but we don't regularly interact. For example, Trove, Heat and
Magnum in some sense are users of the "VM and baremetal" constellation of
projects. We need to work to reach out to all types of "users" and involve
them in the development process, where we can.

None of this should takeaway from a project's ability to work in isolation.
I expect to see various partly overlapping constellations of projects,
indeed constellations that involve projects that are not part of OpenStack.
They all need to thrive, to meet our users needs.

I hope these kinds of efforts will compliment the existing release goals
process that works to prioritize things that affect most or all OpenStack
projects.


Many thanks for reading and considering my candidacy.

John Garbutt

IRC: johnthetubaguy