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Starting this coming Monday, January 8, OpenStack Foundation members will be asked to vote in the Individual Director election.

There are three groups that comprise the OpenStack Board of Directors - appointed members from Platinum sponsors, elected members within the Gold level sponsors, and individual members from the community. This election will be to fill those 8 individual seats and is open to anyone that has registered as a Foundation community member.

The individual members of the board, regardless of company affiliation, have the responsibility of being the representatives of all individual members of the Foundation.

Running for the Board of Directors

During the last few months there had been some discussion within the OpenStack Technical Committee about visibility and communication between the TC, the Board of Directors, and general members of the technical community. There are joint meetings between the TC and Board, but not a lot of interactive discussion, and some talk of reducing the amount of joint meeting time between these groups.

Chris Dent and I are a couple of the TC members that would like to actually see this time spent together increasing, with hopefully the result of closer goals and understanding about OpenStack and where things are going - and where they are today.

After some encouragement from some of the other TC members, and some nudging back and forth between the two of us, we both decided to go for it.

Chris has done some amazingly helpful work with providing weekly reports on the TC activity. We would both like to see the same kind of communication happening with Board activities. Either one, or both, of us plan on extending these kinds of updates if we are elected to the board.

Board Election Candidates

I know Chris and I share a lot similar ideas and concerns around the OpenStack community. I will be very happy if either one of us is elected.

But the good news is, there are really a lot of great candidates running in this election. There are a lot of smart and dedicated people running this time around, including a few of my coworkers, so I think no matter where things end up, we will have a good group of people representing individual members.

So if you receive a ballot in the next couple of days, please take a few moments to read through the list of candidates and their bios and vote for the ones you would like to see representing you on the Board.