Governance/ElectionsSpring2012/William Franklin

Some how falling off the ballot has had me re-think a couple of my thoughts about our governance.

I do want to acknowledge that Stefano IMMEDIATELY took steps once I pointed it out to him that I was not on the ballot.

Thanks Stefano for making this happen fast.

William L. Franklin

I have more than 25 years of experience building systems software with teams of developers contributing to and building commercial products based on a variety of open-source projects. These teams have delivered enterprise products that include operating systems, database engines, migration tools, and e-commerce platforms.

I’ve been a VP of Engineering at Sun, Clustra, Unikala, and Alibris. Before these, I worked in product development, product management and marketing. At Sun, I led multiple releases of OpenSolaris. I served as the exec liason to opensolaris.org and to the redevelopment of the organization’s constitution. I also ran the hosting and operations of opensolaris.org, and I ran user groups and communities for OpenSolaris. I was the exec responsible for virtualbox.org, and I oversaw the contribution of a number of projects to Apache. Other open source communities I’ve participated in include projects within Apache, MySQL, and postgresql.

At Cloudscaling, I lead a growing team of engineers contributing actively to the OpenStack community. Cloudscaling was an early supporter of OpenStack, and we’re building our product portfolio around it.

If this stuff matters, my Bachelors degree is in Computer Science (and another in Economics) from UC Berkeley. There’s also an M.Sc. by Research in Electronic Systems Engineering from the University of Essex in Colchester, England. When I’m not working with an awesome bunch of Pythonistas, you will find me snow skiing with my son, collecting books by P.G. Wodehouse or building silly science projects for seven year olds.

I am running for a seat on the PPB.

Platform Questions

1. Since the last elections, what areas have you focused on and what contributions have you made in order to improve OpenStack as a whole?

OpenStack is the core of our product strategy. Since my arrival at Cloudscaling I have been driving up our contributions - passing them through two of our engineers to the community. We have been working mostly in Nova on networking, ZeroMQ and general bug fixing. Additionally when I first started working in the OpenStack community I reached out to a number of my peers such as Christopher MacGown at Piston Cloud and Joe Arnold at Swiftstack. By improving the quality, processes and awareness of what it takes to build a strong, vibrant, welcoming community we improve the community, and the output of the community, for all of us.

2. What are the most pressing/important issues facing OpenStack as a whole?

The OpenStack community is growing, and the PR buzz is positive. That’s great, but the PPB needs guidance that can represent the interests of both startups and large community members as well as developers. I’ll bring the experience from large-company open source projects, expressed through the soul of a startup. These range from quality and stability, to planning about how to depricate APIs and making it easier for new people to start, both with the community and, the code.

3. What is your relationship to OpenStack & why is its success important to you and/or your company?

We’ve publicly driven a stake in the ground committing to OpenStack. Success of the project relies on a community where the interests of all members are weighed equally and considered in the light of what will produce code that’s of maximal commercial use to the most members. I’m running for this spot because I want to be a voice for balance, and because my background has prepared me to contribute in this way.

Vote for me if you believe that the PPB needs an experienced open source voice who has worked within the governance, development and user communities of a number of large successful open source communities.