I have had the pleasure of serving as an Individually elected member of the OpenStack Board of Directors during 2017. Prior to my current work, I served OpenStack to lead the development of and deliver innovative software building blocks for OpenStack in concert with over 28,000 other individuals involved with OpenStack.
As a result of the OpenStack community output over the past seven years, there has been massive technical software innovation in open infrastructure. While the level of innovation in OpenStack and other adjacent communities has been grand in scale, the increasing pace of software innovation has not been without cost. Integration of the hundreds of different open source projects both within OpenStack and within adjacent communities has created new challenges for operators of Open Source software projects. A challenge for operators is an opportunity for Open Source.
On November 5th, 2017, one day prior to the OpenStack Sydney summit, the OpenStack Board of Directors met with the Technical Committee and User Committee to define a refined strategic framework for improving the state of integration of various Open Source communities involved in open infrastructure development.
During the November 6th, 2017 OpenStack Sydney Summit keynote, Jonathan Bryce rolled out OpenStack's Integration Strategy to Summit attendees. The strategy is focused on four key elements creating a recurrent theme:
The importance of ALL Open Source communities working together to meet user needs! @OpenStack#weareopenstack pic.twitter.com/YL4dxv6wuw
- spotz -Amy Marrich (@spotzz_) November 5, 2017
The OpenStack Foundation required board support in order to roll out this integration strategy. The motion that was proposed after several hours of debate on the precise language and unanimously passed by the Board of Directors via vote was:
"Authorize the Foundation staff to incubate strategic focus areas, including pilot projects, adjacent to the OpenStack Project. At the completion of incubation, a strategic focus area shall be subject to board approval."
One may wonder why such a motion was needed. To better define the use cases, it was determined necessary to organize the community across problem domains called strategic focus areas:
The key principles of each strategic focus area are:
The result of board support of this integration strategy is a stronger connection between open source communities producing infrastructure software. I am super pleased to see what I had envisioned in 2016 becoming reality.
For more information, please reference Jonathan Bryce's mailing list post.