Crusty Blaa

The OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors met for a two hour conference call yesterday. The usual disclaimer applies - this my informal recollection of the meeting. It’s not an official record. Jonathan Bryce has posted an official summary of the meeting.

Executive Director Update - 2017 Budget

After taking a roll call and approving minutes from two previous meetings, Jonathan gave a presentation on the 2017 Foundation budget.

Jonathan described a number of goals under a "One Platform" theme for 2017. He talked about how OpenStack should (a) make sure containers are first class citizens within OpenStack, (b) ensure workload portability across interoperable public and private OpenStack clouds, and (c) reinforce OpenStack position as the standard platform for NFV.

Jonathan went on to remind the board that in 2016 we had planned for a 2016 loss, the idea being to invest some of the cash reserves that the Foundation had built up in order that we could take on some new activities. In 2017, the proposal is to aim for a break even budget so as to avoid not further depleting the reserves. However, with the addition of new Gold Members, we will be able to maintain the increased investment from 2016 while still breaking even. Mark Collier noted that China is a key growth area, given that much of this new funding is from new Gold Members from China.

Jonathan then presented the budget itself, showing quarter-by-quarter income and expenses in a number of high level buckets like "Corporate Fees", "Events", "G&A", "Community Development", and "Community Infrastructure". One particularly striking aspect of OpenStack Foundation budgets is that much of the financial activity comes in Q2 and Q4 with the OpenStack Summit events in those quarters, accounting for $10.5M and $6.5M activity in Q2 and Q3 respectively out of the total $22M budget.

A discussion followed the presentation around what level of financial detail the board would like and expect to have available. Roland Chan expressed a concern that he was unable to tell how the strategic decisions the board had made were impacting the budget. For example, you could compare the 2016 and 2017 high-level budgets and make a good guess as to the impact caused by the addition of the PTG, but it would be nice to understand that in more detail. Some debate ensued as to whether this was information that was already available to the Finance Committee, whether the board should be supplied with a more detailed budget breakdown, or whether we instead need some analysis and commentary about the financial impact of key changes.

Jonathan took an action to prepare some further information which should help address the question. Alan also took an action for the Finance Committee to consider how to address this more structurally. Finally, the 2017 budget was approved by a vote of board members.

User Committee Proposal

Next up, Edgar Magana presented some proposed by-laws changes around the structure of the User Committee and related changes to the UC charter.

Since these changes had been previously discussed by the board, they were put to a vote after some short discussion. The board approved a motion to replace section 4.14 of the by-laws with the text above, along with adding a new UC member policy appendix.

OpenStack Futures

The board then turned its attention to a discussion started at the previous board meeting about the future of the project and some key questions it was felt the board should be considering.

Allison Randal lead the discussion by talking through some of the information the board had gathered in an etherpad since the previous board meeting. We had condensed the questions and concerns into four distinct areas:

1. OpenStack and its evolving relationship with adjacent technologies.
2. Unanswered requirements, and how they will be address by the project over time.
3. Whether OpenStack is sufficiently able to evolve architecturally architecture to meet certain needs.
4. Community health indicators the board and the wider community should be paying attention to.

It was felt that we would only be able to discuss these in a useful way with an in-person board meeting, and the hope is that we will be able to hold this meeting alongside the PTG with involvement from the Technical Committee.

In order to help frame the discussion at that in-person meeting, Allison proposed that board members consider a series of 12 strategic questions as homework for the next board meeting. These questions are based on the 12 "boundary questions" proposed by Werner Ulrich in his work on Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH). There was some discussion as to whether these questions could, in future, be posed to the wider community via a survey.

There was some brief discussion about how this relates to "OpenStack-wide Goals" mechanism recently introduced by the TC. Toby Ford gave the concrete example of "1000s of nodes under the management of a single control plane", and wondered whether that would qualify as an OpenStack-wide goal. Doug Hellmann happened to be on the call and was able to explain that the goals mechanism is used to achieve changes that address concerns across all projects and which can be completed in a single cycle.

The discussion ended with the board agreeing to complete the 12 questions prepared by Allison for an in-person meeting in Atlanta.

Gold Membership Expansion

The final topic of discussion was raised by Shane Wang. Now that the 24 Gold Member slots have been filled, an obvious question remains ... should the Foundation increase the number of Gold Member slots?

Shane made the case that more companies want to join as Gold Members, particularly in China and gave the example of an other major Chinese telecommunications operator that is eager to join.

Roland explained that the topic had been discussed at a recent - but poorly attended - meeting of the Gold Members. It was felt at that meeting that more options need to be considered than simply increasing the number of Gold Member slots - for example, increasing the number of Platinum Member slots so that perhaps some Gold Members could move to Platinum, or the introduction of a Silver Member tier.

However, it was also felt that we should carefully consider our goals even before jumping into considering specific options. Anni made the point that we're trying to achieve a balance between the risk of devaluing the membership status versus wanting to welcome more participation in the Foundation.

All felt that this was an important topic that warranted further discussion and consideration.

Looking Ahead to 2017

And so, the boards work for 2016 has come to an end. The schedule of meetings for 2017 has not yet been finalized, but the next two meetings are likely to be a two hour conference call on January 31 and an all day in-person meeting in Atlanta on February 24.

I had previously posted summaries of most board meetings, but had stopped doing this when I was appointed as Red Hat's representative on the board. Lately, I've sensed folks at Red Hat becoming more interested in the workings of the Foundation, so I figured it might be useful to start doing this again.

The OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors met for a two hour conference call last week. The usual disclaimer applies - this my informal recollection of the meeting. It’s not an official record.

Gold Member Applications

The first half of the meeting was given over to an Executive Session, after which the board voted to approve China Telecom, Inspur, and ZTE as Gold Members of the Foundation.

This completes the handling of the 7 Gold Member applications that were presented to the board at the October 24 meeting in Barcelona. 99Cloud, China Mobile, City Networks, and Deutsche Telecom were approved at that meeting.

For the first time, the Foundation now has reached the maximum of 24 Gold Members. We will only be able to consider applications for new Gold Members if an existing member departs, or if we go through a difficult process to change the limit in our bylaws.

User Committee Proposal

Next up, Edgar Magana updated the board on some proposed changes to the User Committee that was first discussed at the October meeting.

Currently the bylaws describe the User Committee is an "advisory committee" of three members appointed by the Board and TC, which prepares regular reports for the Board and TC. The idea with this proposal is to make the User Committee a parallel entity to the TC, with its members chosen through an election of Active User Contributors (AUC).

The bylaws changes outline how the User Committee has at least five members, that elections of Active User Contributors (AUCs) are held every six months, an affiliation limit for members of the UC, how AUC status is determined, and more.

The hope is that feedback will be collected as comments in the proposal document and that the Board will vote on the proposal during our December 6 meeting. A vote of the Board is sufficient to enact the changes.

One point of discussion was whether bylaws changes are necessary at all. The hope when the bylaws were originally drafted was that the User Committee would have plenty of lattitude to evolve via changes to the UC charter. Edgar made the point that the key change is for the UC to become a parallel entity to the TC rather than an advisory committee to the Board and TC.

"Futures" Discussion

Next, Toby Ford gave a presentation on a topic he had proposed along with Imad Sousou, Allison Randal, and Mark Baker. Toby introduced the topic by saying that as any project evolves and matures, it is important to reflect on competitive threats and the need to evolve the project.

Toby talked about a wide set of competitive threats to OpenStack from the container ecosystem (including Kubernetes and Mesos), to other storage implementations, to various projects in the Telco world (OpenVIM, E2, 3GPPP), and the obvious challenge of AWS, Azure, and Google with AWS revenue over $10B.

Toby moved on to talk about "the good and the bad of the Big Tent", describing the need for a balance between diversity and innovation versus consolidation and refactoring. Toby made the case that we're seeing a lot of expansion in the Big Tent, but not consolidation and refactoring. He expressed particular concern about how and whether core projects will be able to evolve, especially if the Big Tent does not allow for competitors to existing projects.

Toby then put on his "AT&T hat" and talked about the challenges for OpenStack from an AT&T perspective - the need to get to a control plane that scales to 10k servers, the problem of managing over 100 different production sites, the challenge of more and more happening "at the edge" with 5G, innovation happening in the networking space and how it relates to OpenStack, and the unsolved problem of keeping a production environment current with latest OpenStack releases.

To wrap up his presentation, Toby listed a few "possible recommendations" the Board could make to the technical community - (1) allow core projects to have competition within the Big Tent, (2) a mechanism to incubate new approaches, and (3) a mechanism to reationalize, clean up, or refactor.

What followed was a pretty lively discussion that covered much ground, over and beyond the concerns raised by Toby. While the success of OpenStack in bringing together such a diverse set of interests was acknowledged, there was a definite frustration that some form of necessary change is failing to emerge naturally, and whether it falls on the Board to try to at least try to clearly articulate the problem at a strategic level.

Jonathan tried to focus the conversation by giving his perspective that the Big Tent concerns had tied down until "recent comments in the media", and that is probably a distraction from the concerns people are expressing about core projects like Nova and Neutron. He was at pains to say that this isn't about project teams doing bad work - we continue to make huge progress in each release, and valuable work is being done. However, we're definitely seeing frustration from some quarters that it is difficult to influence the community with their ideas.

Jonathan warned that talking too much in the abstract creates the risk that the discussion will go around in circles. Despite this, the discussion never did go into any particular detail on where we've witnessed the problems we were discussing. From my own perspective, it was clear that much of frustration was as a result of how the Ciao and Gluon projects have been received, but we're failing to learn anything significant from those experiences by not talking about them in detail.

By the end of the discussion, we had agree to collaborate on a concrete description of specific problem areas, the questions they raise, and some possible solutions. The hope is that we would complete this before our December meeting, and we may then plan a longer meeting (possibly face-to-face, possibly with the TC) to dig into this.

The OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors met in-person in advance of the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta. This my informal recollection of the meeting. It’s not an official record, etc.

Unlike previous meetings held in advance of summits, this meeting only ran from 09:00 to 14.30 at which time we switched venue for the first ever joint board of directors and technical committee meeting.

I'm about to head off on vacation for a week, so I figured I'd do my best to briefly cover some of the topics covered during the meeting.

Jonathan's Update

After the usual preliminaries, we began the meeting with Jonathan Bryce (in his role as Executive Director) giving the board an update from the Foundation's perspective.

One of the more interesting slides in Jonathan's updates is always the latest statistics showing community and ecosystem growth. We now have over 355 companies supporting the foundation, over two thousand total contributors and almost five hundred active contributors every month. Over 17,000 commits were merged during the Icehouse release cycle, an increase of 25% from Havana. This level growth is just phenomenal.

Jonathan also talked about the growth in visitors to the openstack.org website and made some interesting observations about the geographical spread of the visitors. The top 4 countries seen in the stats are the U.S., India, China and France. That France figures so highly in the stats is a good sign in advance of the summit in Paris in November.

Next, Jonathan moved on to talk about the week ahead in Atlanta. Once again, we're seeing a huge increase in the level of interest in the event with over 4,500 attendees compared to the roughly 3,000 attendees in Hong Kong. Running an even of this size is a massive undertaking and Jonathan mentioned one crazy statistic - the foundation had over 23,000 pieces printed for the event and had to spread those orders over three printing companies in order to be able to do it.

A big emphasis for the week was an increased focus on users and operators. And, interestingly, there were roughly 800 developers and 700 operators signed up for the event. All were agreed that it's a very healthy sign to see so many operators attend.

One comment from Jonathan triggered some debate - that the event was turning into a broader cloud industry event rather than strictly limited to just OpenStack. Some board members raised a concern that the event shouldn't become completely generic and the focus should always be on OpenStack and its ecosystem. Jonathan clarified that this is the intent.

Jonathan also talked about the geographical diversity of attendees at the summit. People were coming from over 55 countries, but 81% attendees were from the U.S. In contrast, in Hong Kong, the percentage of US attendees were more like 40% and Jonathan felt that this showed the importance of regularly holding summits outside of the U.S.

Finances

Jonathan also walked the board through and update on the foundation's financial position. Operating income was 3% above their predictions and expenses was down 7%. This has left the foundation with \$7.8M in the bank, as part of Jonathan's goal to build up a substantial war-chest to ensure the foundation's stability even in the event of unforseeable events.

The summit in Atlanta was predicted to make a loss of \$50k but was on track to make a profit. And yet, while it was predicted to be a \$2.7M event, it was turning out to be a \$4M event. The situation will be very different in Paris because of different cost structures and the event is expected to make a loss. While on the topic, some board members requested that the board be more closely involved in choosing the location of future summits. Jonathan was happy to facilitate that and expected to be able to give the board an update in July.

Jonathan next gave a detailed update on the foundation's application for US federal tax exempt status. He explained that while we are Delaware incorporated, non-stock, non-profit foundation we have not yet been granted 501(c)(6) status by the IRS. After providing the IRS with additional information in November, the IRS returned an initial denial in March and the foundation filed a protest in April.

The objections from the IRS boil down to their feeling (a) that the foundation is producing software and, as such, is "carrying on a normal line of business", (b) that the foundation isn't improving conditions for the entire industry and (c) that the foundation is performing services for its members. Jonathan explained why the foundation feels those objections aren't warranted and that the OpenStack foundation is fundamentally no different from other similar 501(c)(6) organizations like the Linux Foundation. He explained that other similar organizations were going through similar difficulties and he feels it is incumbent on the foundation to continue to challenge this in order to avoid a precedent being set for other organizations in the future. Overall, Jonathan seemed confident about our position while also feeling that the outcome is hard to predict with complete certainty. This conversation continued for some time and, because of the interest, the board moved to establish a committee to track the issue consisting of the existing members of the finance committee along with Eileen, Todd and Sean.

Trademark Framework

Jonathan moved on to give an update on some changes the foundation have made around the trademark programs in place for commercial uses of the mark. The six logos previously used were causing too much confusion so the foundation has merged these into "Powered By OpenStack" and "OpenStack Compatible" marks.

There followed some debate and clarifications were given, before some members expressed concern that the board had not been adequately consulted on the change. That objection seemed unwarranted to me given that Jonathan had briefed the board on the change in advance of implementing it.

Staying on topic of trademark programs, Boris took the floor and gave an update on the DriverLog work his team has been working on. He request the board use the output of DriverLog to enforce quality standards for the use of the OpenStack compatible mark in conjunction with Nova, Neutron and Cinder drivers. There was rather heated debate on the implications of this, particularly around whether drivers would be required to be open-source and/or merged in trunk.

Several board members objected to the fact that this proposal wasn't on the agenda and the board hadn't been provided with supporting materials in advance of the meeting. Boris committed to providing said material to the board before revisiting the issue.

Defcore

Next up, Rob and Josh gave an update on the progress of their DefCore initiative. Rather than attempt to repeat the background here, it's probably best to read Rob's own words.

Once the background was covered, the board spent some time considering the capabilities scoring matrix where each capability (concretely, capabilities are groups of Tempest tests) is scored against 12 selection criteria. This allows the capabilities to be ranked so that the board can make an objective judgment on which capabilities should be considered "must have". There appeared to be generally good consensus around the approach, but a suggestion was made to consider more graduated scoring of the criteria (e.g. 1-5 rather than 0 or 1).

The conversation moved on to the subject of "designated sections". During the conversation, the example of Swift was used and Josh felt the technical committee's feedback indicated that either Swift in its entirety should be a designated section or that none of Swift would be considered binary. Josh also felt that the technical community (either the TC or PTLs) should be responsible for such decisions but I felt that while the TC can provide input, trademark policy decisions must ultimately be made by the board lest we taint the technical communities technical decision making by requiring significant political and business implications to be considered.

One element of clarity that emerged from the discussion was the simple point that "must have" tests were intended to drive interoperability while designated sections were intended to help build our community by requiring vendors to ship/deploy certain parts of the codebase and, by implication, contribute to those parts of the codebase.

As time ran short, the board voted to approve the selection criteria used by the DefCore committee. A straw-poll was also held to get a feel for whether board members saw the need for an "OpenStack compatible" mark in addition to the "OpenStack powered" mark. All but three of the board members (Monty, Todd and Josh) indicated their support for an additional "OpenStack compatible" mark.

Win The Enterprise

Briefly, Imad introduced the "Win the Enterprise" he an his team were kicking off with a session during the summit. The goal is to drive adoption of OpenStack in the enterprise by analyzing the technical and business gaps that may be hindering such adoption and coming up with an action plan to address them.

Feedback from board members was quite positive, with the discussion centered around how the group would measure their success and how they would ensure they operated in the most open and transparent way possible.

There was also some discussion about the need for more product management input to the project along with an additional focused effort on end-users of OpenStack clouds.

Wrapping Up

After the meeting drew to a close, board members joined members of the technical committee for a joint meeting. I'm hoping one of the awesome individuals on the technical committee will write a summary of that meeting!

This was a hugely draining week for many of us at Red Hat. As I prepare to completely switch off for a week, allow me to pass on this sage advise from Robyn Bergeron:

On March 4th, the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors met for an all-day, in-person meeting at DLA Piper's office in Palo Alto, California. This my informal recollection of the meeting. It’s not an official record, etc.

Some 20 of the 24 board members managed to make the meeting in person with Todd and Tristan joining over the phone. Yujie Du and Chris Kemp were unable to attend.

As usual our teleconferencing capabilities were woefully inadequate for those hoping to contribute remotely. However, this time Rob and Lew joined a Google Hangout with video cameras trained on the meeting. One would hope that made it a little easier to engage with the meeting, but we didn't really have any feedback on that.

Before we got started properly, Alan took some time to recommend "Startup Boards: Getting the Most Out of Your Board of Directors" to the directors (based, in turn, on Mark Radcliffe's recommendation) as a book which could provide some useful background on the responsibilities of directors and what it takes to make a successful board.

[Update: Josh points out we also approved the minutes of the previous meeting]

Executive Director Update

Our first meaty topic was one of Jonathan's regular updates.

Jonathan talked about the continued tremendous growth in interest around the project will all the foundation staff's key metrics (e.g. website, developers, twitter, youtube, etc.) at lease doubling in 2013. One interesting aspect of this growth is that the China, India and Japan regions all grew their share of website traffic and this lead to a discussion around whether having the last summit in Hong Kong directly contributed to this shift.

Our community is growing too. We now have over 15,000 individual members of the foundation, over 2,000 contributors to the project over its lifetime and over 400 unique contributors to the project each month.

The mention of 15,000 individual members lead to a somewhat lengthy discussion about the fact that individual membership may be terminated under the following clause of the bylaws:

failure to vote in at least 50% of the votes for Individual Members within the prior twenty-four months unless the person does not respond within thirty (30) days of notice of such termination that the person wishes to continue to be an Individual Member

Jonathan explained how shortly after the foundation was launched, over 6,000 people signed up as individual members. Only 1,500 or so of those initial members have since voted in elections, so we could potentially be looking at removing somewhere in the region of 6,000 members in 2014. This reduced membership will facilitate bylaws changes by making it easier (or even possible) to reach the quorum necessary under clause 9.2(a):

requires an affirmative vote of a majority of the Individual Members voting as provided in Article III, but only if at least 25% of the Individual Members vote

Some discussion points around this included whether a future bylaws change should reduce the quorum requirement to something like 10%, that terminated members can re-register but would then have to wait 180 days in order to be eligible for voting and that project contributors need to be foundation members but some contributors may not be in the habit of voting and may have their membership terminated.

Jonathan moved on with his slide deck and briefly mentioned some of the foundation's new supports like Oracle and Parallels. He also talked about OpenStack is increasingly fulfilling its role as a platform and is being put to work for many diverse use cases. He also included a slide with many positive media and analyst quotes about the project like "Industry support has coalesced around OpenStack".

Jonathan then moved on to the foundation's budget, describing it as an \$8M budget which turned out to be \$11M. Income was up, but expenses were kept in line such that \$2.5M could be put in the bank. He expressed particular pride that 18 months ago the foundation was just starting with no money and already had built up a significant buffer which would allow us all to feel confident about the foundation's future, even in more turbulent or unpredictable times.

Finally, Jonathan review the foundation staff's priorities for 2014:

1. Improve the software - whether that be continued investment by the foundation in the software development process or organizing activities which bring user feedback into the project
2. Improve interoperability between OpenStack-powered products and services
3. Grow the service provider global footprint, with a specific mention for interest from telco operators at Mobile World Congress around OpenStack and NFV

DefCore Update

Next up, Rob and Josh provided an update on the progress of the DefCore committee, requesting a checkpoint from the board as to whether there was consensus that the current approach should continue to be pursued.

Rob started by reviewing the purpose of DefCore and the approach taken to date. He explained that the committee is mandated to look at ways of governing commercial use of the OpenStack trademark and that some issues are deliberately being punted on for now, e.g. an API interoperability trademark and changes to the bylaws.

Josh took over and reviewed the currently agreed-upon criteria that will be used when evaluating whether a given capability will be required in order to use the trademark, e.g.

1. Stable - required to be stable for >2 releases
2. Complete - should be parity in capability tested across extension implementations
3. Discoverable - e.g. can be found in Keystone and via service introspection
4. Widely Deployed - favor capabilities that are supported by multiple public cloud providers and private cloud products
5. Tools - supported by common tools
6. Clients - part of common libraries
7. Foundation - required by other must-have capabilities
8. TC Future Direction - reflects future technical direction
9. Documented - expected behaviour well documented
10. Legacy - previously considered must-have
11. Cluster - tests are available for this capability?
12. Atomic - unique capability that cannot be built out of other must-have capabilities
13. Non-Admin - capability does not require administrative rights

Next, Rob, Josh and Troy walked the board through a draft spreadsheet evaluating potential capabilities against those criteria.

Much of the subsequent discussion revolved around various board members being very eager to get wider feedback on the ramifications of this process, particularly around identifying the most thorny and controversial results. Concerns were expressed that the process has been so involved and detailed that few people are well appraised of where this is headed and may find some of the results very surprising.

Rob & Josh felt that this spreadsheet approach means that we can solicit much more targeted and useful feedback from stakeholders. For example, if a project feels one of its capabilities should be must-have, or a cloud provider is surprised that a capability it doesn't yet provide is seen to be must-have, then the discussion can be around that specific capability, whether the set of criteria and weighting used for evaluation are appropriate, and whether the capability has been correctly evaluated against those criteria.

Finally, Rob & Josh explained the proposed approach for collecting the test results which would be used for evaluating trademark use applications. The idea (known as TCUP, or "tea-cup", for "test collect, upload and publish") currently being developed in the refstack repo on stackforge would allow people to download a docker container image, add your cloud credentials and endpoint URL, run the container which would then execute the tests against the endpoint and upload the results.

[Update: Josh points out that data uploaded via TCUP will "be treated as confidential for the time being"]

Driver Testing

Next, Boris Renski took the floor to talk about Nova, Neutron and Cinder driver testing particularly with a view to how it might relate to trademark usage. This relates to his blog post on the topic some weeks ago.

There were two main observations about changes happening in the technical community - (1) that projects were demanding that vendor maintainers provide reliable third-party automated testing feedback in gerrit patch reviews and (2) that manually maintained, often out-of-date, "driver compatibility matrices" in the OpenStack wiki may soon be replaced by dashboards showing the results of these third-party automated testing systems.

Boris wished to leave that technical work aside (since it is not the board's domain) and focus the discussion on whether the board would consider a new trademark program such that vendors who's drivers pass this automated testing would be allowed the use of a trademark such as "Built for OpenStack".

The debate quickly got heated and went off in several different directions.

Part of the discussion revolved around the automated testing requirements projects were placing on projects, how that worked in practice, the ramifications of that, how deprecating drivers would work, whether a driver being in-tree implied a certain level of quality, etc. I felt the board was really off in the weeds on a topic that is under the authority of the individual projects and the TC. For example, it was easy to forget during the discussion that PTLs ultimately had the discretion to waive testing requirements for individual drivers.

Another surprising element to this was parallels being drawn with the overlap between the OpenStack Activity Board and Stackalytics. Some board members felt that Mirantis's work on Stackalytics had deliberately duplicated and undermined the Activity Board effort, and that the same thing was happening here because this driver testing dashboard naturally (according to those board members) belongs under the DefCore/Refstack efforts. Boris acknowledged he "had his wrist slapped over Stackalytics" and was attempting to do the right thing here by getting advance buy-in. Others felt that the two efforts were either unrelated or that competing efforts can ultimately lead to a better end result.

Another thread of the discussion was that Boris's use of, or allusion to, the special term "certification" automatically strayed this topic into the area of the OpenStack brand and that it was inappropriate to speculate that the foundation would embark on such a program before the board had discussed it.

In the end, the board directed that Jonathan should work with Boris and Rob on a plan to collect any automated test results out there and, secondly, work with the DefCore legal subcommittee to explore the possible use of the trademark in this context.

Operator's Feedback

Tim Bell took the floor next to talk the board through feedback from OpenStack operators collected at the OpenStack Operators Mini Summit the previous day.

The etherpad linked above perhaps provides a better summary than I can give, but some of the highlights include:

• The notion that operators should be able to provide feedback on blueprints as they are drafted, to help get operational insights to developers early on in the development process
• Some observations on the stability (or lack thereof) of some of the core OpenStack components
• The importance of a solid upgrades story was re-iterated
• Some great feedback on TripleO
• The split between teams doing CI/CD and those consuming releases
• How to encourage operators to file more bugs upstream
• Lots, lots more

This feedback was well received by the board and triggered a bunch of discussions and questions.

As a final point, Josh raised some concerns about how the invitee list was drawn up and how he felt it would have been appropriate for vendors (like Piston) to recommend some of their customers to be invited. Tim felt this was an unfair criticism and that the user committee had worked hard to seed the limited seating event with a diverse set of invitees before opening it up to the public.

Emerging Use Cases - NFV

Finally, with limited time remaining, Toby Ford from AT&T briefed the board on Network Function Virtualization (NFV) as an emerging use case for OpenStack which is heavily tied to SDN (Software Defined Network). He described how AT&T have set themselves a mission to:

Simplify, open up, and scale our Network to be more agile, elastic, secure, cost effective and fast by (a) moving from hardware centric to software centric, (b) separating the control plane and data plane and (c) making the network more programmable and open

Toby did a great job of walking through this complex area, leaving me with the understanding that there is a massive shift in the networking industry from hardware appliances to scale-out software appliances running on virtualized commodity hardware.

There appears to be consensus in the networking industry that OpenStack will be the management and orchestration platform for this new world order, but that there is a serious need for telcos and networking vendors to engage more closely with OpenStack in order to make this happen.

Wrap Up and Evening Event

Alan then wrapped up the meeting a little early after talking through the schedule for our next meetings with a conf call on April 3 and an in-person meeting on May 11.

The board then moved on to a local restaurant for dinner. Before and after dinner, I had some great conversations with Tim, Monty, Van and Troy. Funnily enough, because of the layout of the tables and the noise in the restaurant, it was only really possible to talk to the person sitting directly opposite you and so I found myself having an exclusive 2 hour dinner date with Boris! At one point, after Boris knocked a glass of wine over me, I joked that I should tweet "Red Hat and Mirantis tensions finally bubble over to physical violence". But, in all honesty, these in-person, informal conversations around the board meetings are often far more effective at enabling shared understanding and real collaboration than the 20+ person meetings themselves. Such is the nature of the beast, I guess.

The OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors met for a two hour conference call last week. This was the first meeting of the board since the recent Individual and Gold member director elections.

As usual, this my informal recollection of the meeting. It’s not an official record, etc.

Your trusty reporter had just arrived in Brussels for FOSDEM and got to stay in his hotel room for this meeting rather than sampling Belgian's fine beers. Oh, the sacrifices we make! :-P

Preliminaries

As usual, calling the meeting to order was a challenge and it was at least 15 minutes after the scheduled start before we completed the roll call.

Next, Alan welcomed our new directors:

• Yujie Du
• Alex Freedland
• Vish Ishaya
• Imad Sousou

and thanked our outgoing directors:

• Nick Barcet
• Hui Cheng
• Joseph George
• Lauren Sell

as well as thanking those directors who served on the board for part of 2013:

• Devin Carlen
• Jim Curry
• John Igoe
• Kyle MacDonald
• Jon Mittelhauser

Policies, Communication Channels and Meetings Schedule

Since it's a new year, we took the opportunity to review the various policies which apply to board members.

Josh went over our transparency policy mentioning that the board endeavours to be as transparent as possible, with board meetings open to the public, a summary of meetings posted to the foundation list and directors encouraged to use the foundation mailing list for discussions. Sub-committees of the board are expected to be similarly transparent, with wiki pages and public mailing lists. Some caveats to this policy are that board members are not allowed to make public comments about the board meeting until after Jonathan has posted his summary (or 72 hours have passed), members should not discuss executive sessions and the distribution of some non-public documents may have to be limited to directors.

Alan also mentioned our Code of Conduct and encouraged directors to read it carefully. Finally, Jeff from DLA Piper walked us through our antitrust policy where he emphasised the importance of avoiding even the perception that board members are coming together to advance the interests of some companies over others. Members should restrict themselves to pro-competitive collaboration.

Next, we quickly reviewed the various channels for communication that directors need to be aware of - webex for conf calls, the foundation and foundation-board mailing lists, the #openstack-board and #openstack-foundation IRC channels, informal etherpads that we use during board meetings and the various committee mailing lists.

Finally, we discussed the upcoming board meetings - an all-day face-to-face meeting in Palo Alto on March 4, a 2 hour conference call on April 3, an all-day face-to-face meeting in Atlanta on May 11 in advance of the Atlanta summit and another face-to-face on July 21 at OSCON.

The subject of the timing of the Atlanta face-to-face was raised again. May 11 is also Mother's Day (in the US and some other countries) which is a nasty conflict for many board members. However, a poll amongst board members had already established that no better time around the summit could be found, so we are proceeding with the meeting on May 11. The question was raised about whether future board meetings should be scheduled to not align with our summits, but the objection to this idea was that it puts too much of a time and budget strain on those members who have to travel a long distance for the meetings.

Status Reports From Committees

Finally, time to move on to some more meaty topics! A member of each committee of the board was asked to provide a status update and plans for the year ahead.

Alan first described the work of the compensation committee who are responsible for defining and evaluating the goals and performance of the Executive Director. In summary, the committee concluded that Jonathan met his 2013 goals and new goals have been set for 2014.

Next up, Sean Roberts talked about the finance committee. This committee works with the foundation staff on financial budgeting and accounting. Sean described the foundation's IRS filing and that the foundation's 2012 financial audit has been completed and deemed clean (with a note that the foundation is "operating on a cash basis"). The foundation's application for 501(c)(6) is progressing with the IRS asking for some clarifications which were returned to them in December. The committee meets monthly to review any discrepancies above 10%, but there have been no such issues so far. Essentially, everything is in excellent shape.

Tim Bell talked through the latest from the user committee. Tim mentioned the user survey that was published at the Hong Kong summit and how the committee has asked the TC for input on the kind of feedback that would be useful for developers. The committee is preparing to run another survey in advance of the Atlanta summit. Tim also mentioned that the user committee is running a couple of small, focused "operator mini-summits" over the next few months to bring operators together to share their feedback. Tim described the challenge running the committee with a small number of core volunteer members so as to ensure the privacy of survey results while also encouraging volunteers to help with tasks like turning survey feedback into blueprints for new features.

Van Lindberg gave an update on the legal affairs committee. He emphasised that the committee is not counsel for the foundation or the board, but rather a group which makes recommendations to the board on IP policy. He recapped on some of the patent policy recommendations from last year, for example that the foundation should join OIN. There was a brief mention of the fact that all the committee members are currently lawyers and the by-laws limits the number of members to five. He also mentioned that the DefCore committee has a related sub-committee examining possible by-laws changes.

Todd described the elections committee, that is was formed in February 2013 with 8 members and the goal to consider possible changes to the individual member election process. The committee is currently considering proposing a change to either Condorcet or STV and held a town-hall meeting in Hong Kong on the subject. Todd noted that the meeting was lightly attended and there generally has been rather low participation in the process. The main hurdle to getting such a change passed is that a majority of at least 25% of our individual members would need to vote for the by-laws change and the turnout for the previous election was only 17%. However, in July we will be able to begin making inactive members ineligible for voting and this should help us achieve the required turnout.

Rob gave an update from the DefCore committee[5] which is considering changes to the requirements for commercial implementations of OpenStack who wish to use the OpenStack trademark. The committee is currently working to identify a set of must-pass tests and the functional capabilities which these correspond to. Rob mentioned that some projects currently have no or minimal test coverage and, as a result, their capabilities could not be considered for inclusion in the requirements. Rob also mentioned a "programs vs projects" issue which had been identified during the committee discussions and that a meeting with the TC would be required to resolve the issue. I proposed that Rob and Josh could join the TC's IRC meeting to discuss the issue.

Finally, Simon gave a brief overview of the work of the gold member application committee. This committee helps prospective gold members prepare their application such that it fully anticipates all the questions and concerns the board may have about the application.

Wrapping Up

While there were some small number of other items on the agenda, we had run out of time at this point. In the short time available, we had covered a broad range of topics but hadn't really covered new ground. This meeting was mostly about rebooting the board for 2014.