There’s been much talk in recent years about the merits of having a benevolent dictator guide the OpenStack Project a la Linux Torvalds and the Linux Kernel.  While I don’t want to get into the merits of such an approach in this blog post, I do want to call out that in the absence of a benevolent dictator, the health of the OpenStack project relies on the willingness of OpenStack Foundation members to live up to the social contract that implicitly under-girds the project and the community.  A social contract dictates that members of a communities agree to actively come together for the good of the entire community because that ultimately works for the mutual benefit of each member.

That commitment to work together for the common good is what allows users and vendors to contribute code to a project despite sometimes competing priorities and interests.  What is good for OpenStack ultimately benefits all the members and users even if that means our competition benefits as well.  A community built on the premise of a social contract starts to break down if it’s members primarily sees the benefits derived from the project as being a zero-sum game where having winners must require there to be losers.

So how do we begin live up to our obligations as part of the OpenStack social contract?  Clearly, contributions in the form of code, documentation, money, and time are all valuable.  But another way to get involved is by exercising our rights as members to vote on laws to govern the project and to elect representatives.  Doing both enable us to implement processes and to give voice to community members that can strengthen the social contract and ultimately the project and the community.

We are in the midst of the latest voting/election cycle for the Foundation which ends this Friday, 1/16th, 2015.  If you are a member of the OpenStack Foundation have been so prior to 7/20/2014, you have the right and, I would argue, the obligation to vote on some important bylaw changes as well as some new individual members to the OpenStack Board of Directors.  The proposed bylaw changes can be found here and I encourage you to think carefully about the implications of voting yes, no, or abstaining.  In this case, by not voting at all you may be implicitly voting “no” since not having a 25% quorum will effectively defeat any proposed changes.

Another key obligation is the election of representatives to the Board of Directors; details on that election can be found here.  It is of utmost importance that members recognize their obligation to elect board members that can best guide the community towards delivering benefits to all its members.  If members choose to abstain here, at best we may end up with a project that does not accurately represent the goals and needs of its members.  At worst, we may end up allowing small interest groups to gain control of the project who may have their own interests in mind and not that of the wider community.  I don’t believe the latter has happened to date but history tells us that as a community grows and its members becomes less engaged, the possibility of factionalism increases and polarization occurs.  Unless the members take seriously their obligations as part of fulfilling the social contract.

So please make sure you vote.  I am a candidate this year but so are many other worthy candidates.  You can find them all listed here so take a few minutes to look over each candidate’s profile and carefully consider who should represent you.  Please also remember that each member has up to 8 votes that can be dispersed between 1 to 8 candidates, with each candidate receiving some number of votes, determined by the voter, as long as the aggregate amount for all candidates does not exceed 8 votes per voter.

I mentioned that I am running as a candidate this time around.  Below is the profile I submitted to the Foundation.

 

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Kenneth is a candidate in the 2015 Board Election .

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