Goal Champions

Summary

The OpenStack community is seeking coordinators for the work to fulfill our OpenStack-wide Goals.

Business Case

Organizations who sponsor Goal Champions have someone in-house who understands the upstream decision making and implementation work across services and projects. This in-house expertise can help minimize disruption to downstream products and services and help position timely communications and expectations with regard to upcoming changes.

Sponsors of Goal Champions are well-positioned to influence decision-making not only the implementation choices meeting community-wide initiatives, but also to help drive the choice and rollout of upstream goals and use this influence to ensure that one’s own downstream products or deployments remain vital and targeted to real use cases.

Sponsorship of a Goal Champion is a good way for an organisation to demonstrate leadership across the whole of OpenStack, make a direct impact on the productivity of other contributors, and build influence among peers. Goal Champions make great candidates for future elected leadership positions in OpenStack.

Technical Details

Each release series, the OpenStack Technical Committee selects a set of shared objectives to be fulfilled in that release cycle, that provide value across Openstack projects by e.g. advancing consistency and user experience across OpenStack or addressing shared technical debt. These goals are selected from a backlog of potential goals based on feedback from deployers, users, contributors, and PTLs and goal discussion during Forum events.

PTLs are responsible for ensuring that the work required to meet a goal is completed within their own projects, but Goal Champions are needed to guide, coordinate and track the work across projects. A Goal Champion needs a general understanding of the technical issues involved in a goal, but primarily needs to communicate, track progress, foster shared understanding across projects, and help remove impediments.

Contact

If possible, attend Forum and Summit sessions on series goals and offer to sponsor a champion for a goal as part of the discussions at these. After these face to face events, discussion of goals continues on the Technical Committee IRC channel (#openstack-tc on OFTC) and on the OpenStack-discuss mailing list using the [goals] tag in the subject line.