The OpenStack Foundation regularly conducts Elections for Individual Directors of the Foundation’s Board, next elections for the 2015 Board of Directors are going to be held from Monday January 12, 2015 to Friday January 16, 2015. It is time to decide who are the candidates as nominations are occurring during these days, from November 24 to December 12, 2014.
This process is important for the legitimacy of the Foundation and for the strenght of the open source cloud computing project. These directors are meant to represent the voices and interests of the developers and contributors to the OpenStack project as a whole, and of the operators of OpenStack-based clouds. Among the responsabilities of the 24 person Board is the budget of the Foundation, strategy and goals, the board is constituited by directors elected by the 8 Individual Members, directors elected by the 8 Gold Members and directors appointed by the 8 Platinum Members.
Individual Members Director board seats are meant to serve as the Individual Members of the Foundation and they are the connection between the community of the Foundation and the Board, it is important to mention that they are not supposed to represent the companies for which they work.
Voters are supposed to review each canditate’s application on the candidate OpenStack page. Browsing at the candidates we can easily recognize some famous names in the OpenStack panorama, such as Tim Bell, Richard Fontana, Vishvananda Ishaya, Chris Kemp, Russell Bryant and Alessandro Perilli. Tim Bell, who is CERN’s Infrastructure manager is responsible for making sure IT is functional to deliver to 11,000 physicists using OpenStack to provide large-scale computing resources. Richard Fontana, who is Senior Director and Associate General Counsel, Cloud & Open Source at Hewlett-Packard. According to Openstack Foundation Bylaws, no more than two members of the board can be affiliated with the same company and among the nominees there are two members of Nebula, Vishvananda Ishaya, Chief Technology Officer and Chris C. Kemp founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Nebula, cloud computing company that offers an Infrastructure as a Service OpenStack cloud system. We can also find two members of Red Hat, Russell Bryant, who is Senior Principal Software Engineer and Alessandro Perilli, former Gartner analyst and now General Manager, Cloud Management Strategy at Red Hat, responsible for company’s overall cloud management strategy, notoriously a voice out of the chorus with his skepticism about OpenStack.
Election Timeline Summary:
- November 24: Individual Member nominations open, election details live on openstack.org
- December 12: Individual Member nominations close
- December 19: Deadline for Individual Member Nominees to complete application
- January 7: Gold Member Director Selector Election (1 day)
- January 12: Individual Member Elections open
- January 16: Individual Member Elections close