It has been a while since the last one of these that had any substance. The run up to the PTG and travel to and fro meant either that not much was happening or I didn't have time to write. This week I'll attempt to catch up with TC activities (that I'm aware of) from the PTG and this past week.

Board Meeting

The Sunday before the PTG there was an all day meeting of the Foundation Board, the Technical Committee, the User Committee and members of the Interop and Product working groups. The agenda was oriented towards updates on the current strategic focus areas:

• Better communicate about OpenStack
• Community Health
• Requirements: Close the feedback loop
• Increase complementarity with adjacent technologies
• Simplify OpenStack

Each group gave an overview of the progress they've made since Boston. Mark McLoughlin has a good overview of most of the topics covered.

I was on the hook to discuss what might be missing from the strategic areas. In the "Community Health" section we often discuss making the community inviting to new people, especially to under-represented groups and making sure the community is capable of creating new leaders. Both of these are very important (especially the first) but what I felt was missing was attention to the experience of the regular contributor to OpenStack who has been around for a while. A topic we might call "developer happiness". There are a lot of dimensions to that happiness, not all of which OpenStack is great at balancing.

It turns out that this was already a topic within the domain of Community Health but had been set aside while progress was being made on other topics. So now I've been drafted to be a member of that group. I will start writing about it soon.

PTG

The PTG was five days long, I intend to write a separate update about the days in the API and Nova rooms, what follows are notes from the TC-related sessions that I was able to attend.

As is the norm, there was an etherpad for the whole week, which for at least some things has relatively good notes. There's too much to report all that happened, so here are some interesting highlights:

• To encourage community diversity and accept the reality of less-than-full time contributors it will become necessary to have more cores, even if they don't know everything there is to know about a project.
• Before the next TC election (coming soon: nominations start 29 September) a report will be made on the progress made by the TC in the last 12 months, especially with regard to the goals expressed in the vision statement. We should have been doing this all along, but is perhaps an especially good idea now that regular meetings have stopped.
• The TC will take greater action to make sure that strategic priorities (in the sense of "these are some of the things the TC observes that OpenStack should care about") are effectively publicised. These are themes that fit neither in the urgency of the Top 5 list nor in the concreteness of OpenStack-wide Goals. One idea is to prepare a short list before each PTG to set the tone. Work remains to flesh this one out.

The Past Week

The week after the PTG it's hard to get rolling, so there's not a great deal to report from office hours or otherwise. The busiest day in #openstack-tc was Thursday where the discussion was mostly about Glare's application to be official. This has raised a lot of questions, many of which are in the IRC log or on the review. As is often the case with contentious project applications, the questions frequently reflect (as they should) the biases and goals the reviewers have for OpenStack as a whole. For example I asked "Why should Glare be an OpenStack project rather than a more global project (that happens to have support for keystone)?" while others expressed concern for any overlap (or perception thereof) between Glance and Glare and still others said the equivalent of "come on, enough with this, let's just get on with it, there's enough work to go around."

And with that I must end this for this week, as there's plenty of other work to do.