When I started contributing to OpenStack, almost five years ago, it was a small ecosystem. There were no foundation, a handful of projects and you could understand the code base in a few days.

Fast forward 2016, and it is a totally different beast. The project grew to no less than 54 teams, each team providing one or more deliverable. For example, the Nova and Swift team each one produces one service and its client, whereas the Telemetry team produces 3 services and 3 different clients.

In 5 years, OpenStack went to a few IaaS projects, to 54 different teams tackling different areas related to cloud computing. Once upon a time, OpenStack was all about starting some virtual machines on a network, backed by images and volumes. Nowadays, it's also about orchestrating your network deployment over containers, while managing your application life-cycle using a database service, everything being metered and billed for.

This exponential growth has been made possible with the decision of the OpenStack Technical Committee to open the gates with the project structure reform voted at the end of 2014.

This amendment suppresses the old OpenStack model of "integrated projects" (i.e. Nova, Glance, Swift…). The big tent, as it's called, allowed OpenStack to land new projects every month, growing from the 20 project teams of December 2014 to the 54 we have today – multiplying the number of projects by 2.7 in a little more than a year.

Amazing growth, right?

And this was clearly a good change. I sat at the Technical Committee in 2013, when projects were trying to apply to be "integrated", after Ceilometer and Heat were. It was painful to see how the Technical Committee was trying to assess whether new projects should be brought in or not.

But what I notice these days, is how OpenStack is still stuck between its old and new models. On one side, it accepted a lot of new teams, but on the other side, many are considered as second-class citizens. Efforts are made to continue to build an OpenStack project that does not exist anymore.

For example, there is a team trying to define what's OpenStack core, named DefCore. That is looking to define which projects are, somehow, actually OpenStack. This leads to weird situations, such as having non-DefCore projects seeing their doc rejected from installation guides.

Again, I reiterated my proposal to publish documentation as part of each project code to solve that dishonest situation and put everything on a level playing field

Some cross-projects specs are also pushed without implication of all OpenStack projects. For example, The deprecate-cli spec which proposes to deprecate command-line interface tools proposed by each project had a lot of sense in the old OpenStack sense, where the goal was to build a unified and ubiquitous cloud platform. But when you now have tens of projects with largely different scopes, this start making less sense. Still, this spec was merged by the OpenStack Technical Committee this cycle. Keystone is the first project to proudly force users to rely on

openstack-client, removing its old keystone command line tool. I find it odd to push that specs when it's pretty clear that some projects (e.g. Swift, Gnocchi…) have no intention to go down that path.

Unfortunately, most specs pushed by the Technical Committee are in the realm of wishful thinking. It somehow makes sense, since only a few of the members are actively contributing to OpenStack projects, and they can't by themselves implement all of that magically. But OpenStack is no exception in the free software world and remains a do-ocracy.

There is good cross-project content in OpenStack, such as the API working group. While the work done should probably not be OpenStack specific, there's a lot that teams have learned by building various HTTP REST API with different frameworks. Compiling this knowledge and offering it as a guidance to various teams is a great help.

My fellow developer Chris Dent wrote a post about what he would do on the Technical Committee.

In this article, he points to a lot of the shortcomings I described here, and his confusion between OpenStack being a product or being a kit is quite understandable. Indeed, the message broadcasted by OpenStack is still very confusing after the big tent openness. There's no enough user experience improvement being done.

The OpenStack Technical Committee election is opened for April 2016, and from what I read so far, many candidates are proposing to now clean up the big tent, kicking out projects that do not match certain criteria anymore. This is probably a good idea, there is some inactive project laying around. But I don't think that will be enough to solve the identity crisis that OpenStack is experiencing.

So this is why, once again this cycle, I will throw my hat in the ring and submit my candidacy for OpenStack Technical Committee.