Roberts2017

Last modified by sarob on 2017/03/02 05:37

I want to be an OSI board member. Read about my background and what I want to accomplish below.

My Background:

I am honored to have been involved with the creation and running of the OpenStack Foundation over its first two years. I represented both Yahoo and VMware over my years on the Openstack board. I stood for internal board elections three times and was elected to represent the community, the Gold level OpenStack board members, and then my company.

I attended close to fifty board related meetings. I never missed a single meeting. I always came prepared. I was never paid, but I always treated the board director position as an important job that deserved my time and respect.

I co-wrote the foundation bylaws with about ten other OpenStack participating companies. I served as Director on the OpenStack Board and the Finance Committee Chairman. The Finance committee acts as the board’s financial oversight with authority over budget variances, auditing, and the foundation non-profit status. The board met every four-six weeks to work on governance, strategy, licensing, indemnification, elections, and representation. I also served on the New Membership committee, advising new potential board members on what their responsibilities will be if they are accepted.

In general, the board dealt with DCO verses CLA debates and other legal debates, establishing the standards for OpenStack brand licensing, balancing the separation of administrative and technical oversight, finance oversight, new member applications, and many other foundation administrative functions at the board.

I have also volunteered my time with other organizations such as OpenStack User Groups and IEEE MSST conferences. I have been an OpenStack San Francisco Bay User Group organizer since 2011, for which I have hosted hundreds meetings with a over 6,000 members. Meeting subjects have been varied ranging from OpenStack projects, hackathons, and occasionally OpenStack based products. I have been an MSST Executive Committee Member and Conference Tutorial Chair since September 2011. This is a IEEE Computing committee in partnership with the Santa Clara University serving the high energy physics and research community.

Why serve on the OSI board?

In addition to my ability to contribute to the day to day board business, there are two main areas I want to influence the community through the board.

First

I want to raise awareness in the open source community at large of the importance of project to product development. This the activity of coordinating upstream and downstream development work. In any organization that is developing and supporting software, there are some number of engineers that work on public projects. It is a common problem that the Development Managers and the Scrum Masters do a poor job of tracking that public work. As a result, upper management is not aware of what the upstream work purpose is and its importance to supporting the overall development strategy.

I want to build the practice of treating public projects like another engineering organization. If you are going to work with another engineering team, you expect to have a clear understanding of responsibilities and timelines. Each organization needs to have the exact same expectations when working with a public project.

Second

I want to promote commercial company leadership in technology through their substantial contributions to the open source community. My focus is to double down on the message that leadership will require more than just the use of open source code or semi-annual code drops. To be a leader, it will require considerable  participation with groups (communities) outside of their company. Participation in each of these communities needs to be treated like working for a company. Substantial results require substantial participation.

Thanks for considering my election to the board. I am happy to answer any questions. Reach out to me on twitter @sarob and through my blog at https://sarob.com.

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