My journey with the OpenStack project has been a very rewarding one. I have had the good fortune of meeting some wonderful people and being part of a very dynamic and vibrant community. I am the founder and the lead organiser of the OpenStack Indian User Group. I am also an OpenStack Ambassador, one of the few people around the world nominated into the post by the OpenStack Foundation. I was also elected to the OpenStack Board of Directors as an Individual director in 2015 by the support of the OpenStack community. I take these roles very seriously and do my best to live up to responsibilities that come with them.
The community has been kind enough to nominate me as a candidate again for this year’s Board of Directors Election. This is a great honour for me and a very humbling experience. I would welcome the opportunity to keep representing my community and my region at the Board of Directors. I feel that the Asian region generally, and India specifically, are still very under represented. More than 30% of the use cases for OpenStack and almost 40% of the users come from Asia. India has the tone of the largest user community and the fastest growing user community in the OpenStack ecosystem. We doubled to over 5200 members in the meetup group alone in the last year.
I was one of the founders and a vocal supporter of the Diversity Working Group during my tenure as an Individual director. I hope this will ensure that the OpenStack Foundation and the ecosystem continue to support and cater to a wider audience and include people of all background in the governance process. I was also instrumental in pushing for a governance process that places greater importance on the feedback collected from the users.
I am determined to see an OpenStack Summit in India as soon as possible. I will be pushing hard for this during 2016. I will also continue to push for more workshops, hackathons and events to be organised across the globe. This will help build up the ecosystem and the talentpool of new operators and developers. I would also strive to push for greater focus and attention to be put on System Integrators and operators of OpenStack.
Finally, I would also like to remind the voters that this is an election of the directors selected from amongst the individual members. Most of the companies that support the OpenStack Foundation have already or are in the process of voting in Board Gold members along company lines to represent their interests. I would urge the voters to not vote for their employers but to vote in true democratic fashion: for who they think would best represent the interest of the individual members and their region.
Kavit Munshi
