I’m currently in Beijing at the OpenStack APAC conference. I’m stunned at the enormous attendance (well over 1000 and many more in Shanghai), and like the San Francisco summit, the enthusiasm is incredibly infectious. This is the quote of the day from an opening speech by a gentlemen from the “Ministry of Industry and Information Technology Software and Integrated Circuit Promotion Center” (yep) “OpenStack will bring down the monopoly of the existing commercial cloud providers”!
You may have seen recently that the OpenStack Foundation is being formed and membership is now open for Individuals and Corporate Sponsors. The OpenStack Foundation will be an independent body providing shared resources to help achieve the OpenStack mission by protecting, empowering, and promoting OpenStack software and the community around it, including users, developers and the entire ecosystem.
This is an exciting time for OpenStack establishing an independent, permanent legal home that can represent Stackers everywhere. The cost to become an Individual Member is FREE! Like beer, and software!
As an Individual Member, you can:
– Get active in the OpenStack community as a user, developer, business person, art maker, or however you want to contribute;
– Run for an elected position such as Project Technical Lead for projects you contribute to, Technical Committee Member, or Foundation Board of Directors Member;
– Vote in elections such as for the Board of Directors; and
– Stay informed on the latest OpenStack news through member updates.
You can join the Foundation at https://www.openstack.org/join/
I am very pleased to hear that I’ve been nominated for election for the OpenStack Foundation Board, with the elections to be held online between the 20th and 24th of August.
http://www.openstack.org/election/2012-board-election/candidates/
I’m hoping to represent all Stackers in Australia, and provide some International presence on what is likely to be a Board heavily weighted with US representation in the 16 seats of the Platinum and Gold members, and probably also in the 8 seats for the Individual Members. Another reason for why I’d like to be on the Board is to push for better global communication between the User Groups around the world. We are working on a world-class project, I believe we need a world-class portal or facility that goes beyond the abilities of IRC, mailing lists and meetup.com to ensure we all work together most effectively. We could build a portal that is geared to managing a large scale global collaborative project, that hooks into GitHub and the other crucial components in the eco-system, and ultimately design it so it will be of use to other community projects. If you want to know anything about the Foundation or Board please do not hesitate to email me or call me any time on 0400 399 211.
So please, join the Foundation and get involved. To vote in the initial Board election, you MUST become an Individual Member by August 15th.
Please give me feedback on what you think the Board will need to do to make OpenStack a success, and when voting comes along in a couple of weeks’ time, please turn out and cast a vote for me to represent you and the Australian OpenStack User Group. We’ve got a formidable task ahead of us to get the numbers, and every vote counts.
On the upcoming events front, I know its been a little quiet through August, but we have an OpenStack code dojo in Hobart next week, then an inaugural meetup in Adelaide on August 28. Technical presentation meetups are planned for Sydney and Melbourne in September, but the biggest news is that there’ll be a whole lot of OpenStack at linux.conf.au in January! I will have more details on his very soon.
Cheers
Tristan
Blogged from behind the Great Wall.
