Governance/Foundation/8Mar2017BoardMinutes

The following is a summary posted by the Executive Director. The official minutes will be replace this posting once they are approved by the board at the next OpenStack Board meeting.

Hi everyone,

Last week we had about 40 people across the Board, TC, UC and a few working group volunteers gather in Boson for a strategy session and meetings. This included a joint session as well as a Board meeting and TC workshop. The agenda was published on the wiki: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Governance/Foundation/8Mar2017BoardMeeting

On Wednesday, we conducted a joint strategy session, primarily organized by Allison Randal and Alan Clark, to discuss issues and important actions around five key areas: 1) Communicating about "what is OpenStack," 2) Unanswered requirements, 3) Relationships with adjacent technologies, 4) Changes to OpenStack technology and 5) Community health. We’re working to compile and share more detail around the outcomes of the strategy workshop in a Superuser article, and we will share it with this mailing list.

On Thursday, the Board of Directors held a meeting. I provided an update on our progress this year based on the plans we communicated in the January board meeting. The primary focus has been changing the narrative around how OpenStack is perceived, leading with how second generation private clouds cost less and do more. I’ve attached the presentation with more details if you’d like to dig in. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions.

The Board then heard presentations from potential new members. After discussions regarding the applications, the Board approved Huawei as a Platinum Member to fill the spot HPE resigned, as well as H3C as a new Gold Member. We also heard from the User Committee and Product Working Group regarding their proposal to help facilitate the Forum at the Boston Summit. Finally, the Board approved my 2017 goals laid out by the Compensation Committee and began a discussion around 2017 goals for the Board.

The Board also approved the promotion of Thierry Carrez to VP of Engineering for the OpenStack Foundation. Thierry has been a leader in the technical community since the beginning of OpenStack and has also built a team within the Foundation focused on upstream collaboration.

There will be several places where the discussions from the week will continue and interact with other ongoing efforts (TC initiatives, Forum, etc), so keep an eye out for more information on these topics. I hope I speak for everyone who attended when I say we walked away from this week with our eyes open to the challenges we face, but also energized and ready to tackle them. While we certainly have a lot of work to do, there’s never been a greater opportunity for OpenStack given the strength of our community and the value our technology is providing users around the world.

Thank you to all of Technical Committee, User Committee and Board Directors who made the trip or participated on the phone (from opposite timezones!) to make this such a productive week.

Thanks, Jonathan 13 March 2017