openstack team mailing list archive

[Joshua McKenty <joshua@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is great!   

Jonathan, do you think a completely-elected board is something that the larger corporations would go along with? Ben's suggestion to that effect certainly seems to be the simplest model, since we can scale the membership, deliver specific value for cash contributions, and still manage the size of the board.

Regarding the "Individual Member" seats - I would like to echo Devin's concerns about stacking by strategic members. If these are truly independent, meaning that they're not employees of the corporate members, then I think it's a great benefit to have them be part of the board! I'm imagining folks like Tim Bell (CERN), Peter Mell (NIST) or Vint Cerf on there.  

Boris, I completely agree with decoupling of the "business side" of OpenStack from the technical side, and I think managing two separate organizations would be one way to achieve this. My concerns are solely on the business side right now. I've spent a lot of time chatting with the PTLs today, and I have confidence that they can hold the technical community to a meritocratic standard. I think the proposal to vote for seats on the foundation board is more about managing board size, than any crossover of technical community management.  

Having said that, I'm still concerned with the idea that we would "let the bigger guys pay more and get a bigger logo on the homepage". If we're going to "sell" OpenStack privileges, I think we need to do it ala-cart, and explicitly.  

Some examples (echoing Ben Cherian's comments) might be:  
 - Use of the trademark (for products, training, or certification)
 - Sponsorship of openstack events
 - Priority registration for summits and conferences (not necessarily in favor of this one...)

While I was drafting this up, I saw Sean Robert's email suggesting that we meet face-to-face and work through some of this together - it seems like a fantastic plan to me, and I'll bump everything else from my schedule to make it happen if others are interested. What do you guys think?  


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Joshua McKenty, CEO
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"Oh, Westley, we'll never survive!"
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On Friday, March 9, 2012 at 3:06 PM, Jonathan Bryce wrote:

> On Mar 9, 2012, at 4:50 PM, Boris Renski Jr. wrote:
> > The one thing I would do away with is the “elected board members” in favor of more associate member seats. This almost feels like a way to compensate the technology side for giving the marketing side leverage over the former. If we feel that this is necessary, it is a symptom of presence of technology-commercial coupling and we need to fix something else. All technical members should be elected based on merit. All board members – appointed based on monetary/evangelism contribution. Decoupling between technology direction and purchasing power should be rock solid.
>  
>  
> Thanks for the thoughts, Boris. One point I'd make: the Individual Member seats are not just about compensating the technology side. It gives an opportunity for the entire community to elect representatives. These could be some of the "luminaries" Josh spoke of or others unaffiliated with any corporate member. Individual Membership is not limited solely to developers who are contributing code, but would include users, deployers, translators, marketers and people with all sorts of involvement in the community. Individual Membership is free and a great place for participants academic institutions, non-profits, etc. to participate with no price tag.
>  
> Jonathan.