The OpenStack Foundation recently launched their voting tool for rating presentation proposals for the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, May 12-16. While the chairs for each track make the final decisions about which presentation topics make the cut, voting is a great way for the community to get involved and participate in the agenda-setting process.

Conference talks are proposed from a variety of different individuals with different corporate affiliations and different relationships to the OpenStack project. Listing all of them here would be difficult, but in keeping with the theme of our Beginners in Open Source Week, here are a few that might appeal to beginners:

"Swift is an object storage system designed for data that needs to be instantly accessible, stored forever, and accessible from multiple devices."

"This session will provide detailed information for new developers who are planning to get on board with the OpenStack Development."

"Getting started with Openstack is not an easy task, even for the most experienced developer or sysadmin. The nature of Openstack makes it incredible flexible, extendible."

"OpenStack continues to grow exponentially as the de facto standard for open source cloud platforms. But how can someone quickly get started with learning this exciting new technology?"

"If you want to program the cloud, you've come to the right place. Here, you'll start by firing up your own fully functional OpenStack installation, and go on to write no less than two Python applications for it."

"This is where you'll learn how to hack OpenStack itself. You'll start by firing up your own OpenStack development environment, go on to modify OpenStack itself, and end the session learning how to contribute your modification back to the project."

"This session is focused on developing applications FOR OpenStack, not developing OpenStack itself. There are always a ton of sessions that tell you how to deploy, manage, and scale an OpenStack cloud as from an infrastructure perspective, but this talk is focused on developers that are new to OpenStack and just want some help getting started."

"This session will provide an overview of the current, circa Icehouse, OpenStack Compute architecture. You will learn how OpenStack Compute interacts with other OpenStack components and be given a grounding in common Compute terminology."

"For an OpenStack python developer with limited networking background, following some tutorials and installing neutron is not that hard, but understanding neutron's network abstraction and connecting to an instance successfully is full of exceptions."

In order to vote, you've got to be a member of the OpenStack Foundation. But signing up as an individual member is quick, easy, and free, so if you've got an interest in OpenStack and haven't yet taken the step to register, this should be your incentive. Want to learn more about OpenStack? We can help you with that, too!

Voting closes at midnight central time on Monday, March 3, so if you've got an opinion, go register it now. Which talk are you most looking forward to? Let us know in the comments below.