Barton's Blog

One of the trickiest things to get right in an open source project is the governance model.  Who makes up the various boards and gets what authority is something struggled over and something that virtually no one gets right straight out of the gate.  Its particularly interesting if you are a commercial entity sponsoring a project and want to maintain a certain amount of influence over the endeavor but also want it to grow and flourish.

Two weeks ago Jonathan Bryce, Rackspace cloud co-founder and one of the leads of the OpenStack project policy board, announced the changes that were being made to OpenStack’s governance.

I ran into Jonathan on Monday during South by Southwest and sat down with him to get some more insight into what the changes were and why they were being made.

Some of the ground Jonathan covers:

• From Mosso to Rackspace cloud to OpenStack
• How they’ve been surprised by the great uptake by the community and how this has led them to evolve the governance structure.
• What the various boards are and what their make up will be
• Which roles will be 6-month stints.

Extra-credit reading

• OpenStack Governance Election Process — The OpenStack blog

• OpenStack Governance Update — The OpenStack blog

• OpenStack Governance Model — The OpenStack wiki

• OpenStack Installer Demo at SXSW — Barton’s blog

Pau for now..

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 16th, 2011 at 9:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.