 Okay. Good afternoon everyone and thank you very much for joining us at our panel Meet the OpenStack Ambassadors. We're very fortunate to have time from our ambassadors today. They're quite busy people. So my name is Tom Feifield. I'm from the OpenStack Foundation and we're here to talk about the Ambassador Program, which aimed to create a framework of community leaders around the world to kind of glue everything together. Because OpenStack has more than 75 user groups around the world in more than 50 different countries and each of them are very different people from different cultures, different company backgrounds, different technical backgrounds. And so we created the OpenStack Ambassador Program to try and get some of our best practice leaders together. And here's one of our best practice leaders arriving slightly late to kind of pave the way for everything that's been going on. And so you can see on this wiki page here some of the roles of the Ambassador Programs, basically acting as a liaison between all of the user groups in the world and the foundation. So information gets down to the user groups and we can collate all of that feedback from all of these people who hang around in the user groups back up to the top level. They help find the right people to talk to. Everyone here kind of knows everyone in the community. So if you see one of these guys around the conference, buy them a beer or just be annoying and ask them lots of questions because they know more than they will tell you. We want coffee in that beer. Exactly, exactly. But without further ado, I'd love to introduce to you the OpenStack Ambassadors. And if possible, please, can you just say your name and where you're from? Okay. Hi everyone. I'm Akira Yoshiyama from Japan. Nice to meet you. Hello everyone. My name is Marcelo, Marcelo Jeter, and I am from Brazil. My name is Ken Hoi and I'm from the US, northeast. G'day, I'm Tristan and I'm from Australia. Hello, my name is Martin Kish and I'm from Hungary. Hi, my name is Erwin Galen. I'm from France. Hey, my name's Michael Still and I'm from Australia as well. John Roberts, I am from California, western United States. David Munchi, I'm from India. And you can see that we've got basically the entire world covered. We've got time zone coverage. If you have a problem at any time of the day or night, you can get in touch with one of these guys. And so just to kick off the panel, I'd like to throw a question to the ambassadors. Since you're all from different regions, what's special about your region? What are the challenges you face? What challenges do people face using OpenStack? That's a difficult one to begin with. Thanks, Tom. Don't just give one word answers like neutron. Yeah, yeah. Well, Australia obviously coming to summits, we have to come a long way. So that's probably a difficult thing. Michael, do you have any other thoughts on particular difficulties in Australia? I think different markets are at different stages of adoption. So I don't know about other markets. I think a lot of people in Australia are doing proof of concept, relatively small deploys. And that doesn't particularly surprise me because I feel like our marketplace lags, say the US, by a couple of years with most things. Yeah, very cool. I think we also feel the pressure of a growing economy. So there's a lot of competing technologies out there that compete for talent. It's very difficult to find talent on the ground that basically knows what to do. And to drive that growth, we have to go to universities that are outside the main metropolitan cities and try and interest students to basically learn about the cloud, learn about what are going to be the emerging technologies. That's been a very big challenge for us. So for Brazil, it's very difficult to bear this language because the people don't speak much English in the other countries around the South America and it's very hard also to find speakers, speakers about cloud, about OpenStack. I think it's the most difficult for us. Yeah, for us in France, we have lots of OpenStack developers. So for Meetup, it's quite easy. And for the market, yeah, lots of companies are still in POC status but we have in the telco few production deployments, so quite active group in France. In Hungary and it is true for entire Eastern Europe that the people usually don't like to learn very new things because they have used to do something and they want to do the same. But maybe to teach this DevOps culture and how to use cloud and teach them about cloud, it is very hard. And the other thing I see as a problem that we don't have a culture of traveling to conferences. For example, it works very well in the States, but in Central Europe, maybe moving from Sofia to Budapest for a conference, it is not a so common thing and moving out to a different city. Anyway, we don't have so huge distances, so technically it cannot be a problem. So it sounds like there are many issues around the world. So in your role as an ambassador, what are you doing to solve some of these issues? How are you helping people to, you know, well, how are you helping to promote and protect and empower the OpenStack community and ensure that in every region we have a high quality OpenStack experience? I think we started with one city, Bangalore in India, and we made it a conscious effort. We are in 10 to 11 cities now. We try and go to cities and we approach universities or software companies to give us a venue. We try and do a basic what is OpenStack, what is cloud, kind of a session. And we also try and show the docs. We also try and show a demo. And we try and go outside the cities where the infrastructure is very good and people would find out about OpenStack anyway. And we try and go out to rural areas where it is not as popular or there are not many resources. And we try and foster adoption. We also try and organize, we are in the process of organizing a mentorship program where we try and nominate people from several vendors and try and get them to either go to a university or talk to students or talk to just a general community about a particular project and help out anyone who wants to get into development or ops, stuff like that. So that's been the focal point so far. I think in Brazil I am one of the founder of user Brazil groups or it's very hard to do the user group in a country as Brazil because it's the biggest country. So I help finding people to organize local events in Brazil, in other locations, South Brazil, North of Brazil. And I think it's defined that people can help to disseminate the OpenStack is the better role. So in Australia we've had an OpenStack day at like our biggest open source tech conference for the last couple of years. And I think one of the things what I needed to do was listen to people about what they were getting out of that. It was actually really interesting. System admins weren't going because they thought it was a day for people developing OpenStack. So we were totally hitting the wrong market if that makes sense. And so we're kind of pivoting. We're going to rebrand it. We're going to make it clearer that it's about deploying OpenStack and what OpenStack can do for operators and system admins and app developers. And so we'll see if that helps and maybe we'll come back with some data about rebranding. And I'd like to, Sean, did you have something to say? I was going to say we had the opposite problem because there are so many companies actually commercially working on OpenStack in the area I live in. Most of those guys don't have the time to go do something extra at this point. They did in the beginning. That's how the user group in that area got started as a hackathon. So now we have the opposite problem that the people showing up are real beginners usually from, you know, Python experienced, OpenStack inexperienced to real beginners all the way. So that's why we started training people because they didn't have any experience. In Japan, we, in Japanese OpenStack user group, had joined many local open source event. And we had 19 study meetups. So we have to continue the activity. In Eastern Europe, I'm trying to find the proper leaders who can start maybe a new user group in different countries. And I guess what we did good in Hungary that we built up a lot of marketing and promotion channels. And I tried to support those people to clone the same story and reach different audiences of the industry. For example, now we are reaching the enterprises, the startups and financial and telecommunication sectors. So almost everybody. And I think we need to clone this model into the different countries. And what we did, we started to organize also one day conference in Budapest. We did two in the last two years. And it is a good chance for everybody in the region to gather into one place and talk about the common problems or how to deploy OpenStack and learn from each other. And I think that's a good point to jump into something a little bit different. I'm not sure if the audience on entering this room realized that this was an interactive session. Because, yes, we should lock the door. You're all stuck here. And we actually, in preparation for this meeting, one of the things that we decided on is that we actually wanted to spend quite a lot of our time actually listening to what people in the room wanted the ambassadors to be doing or what you need in terms of OpenStack. So we actually have three microphones there. I would really appreciate if anyone could get up to one of those microphones and give a demand or ask a question. I have seen the etherpad. So while someone's going to the microphone, I'll just answer one of the questions there quickly. The OpenStack ambassadors are volunteers, entirely volunteers. They're doing all of this amazing work by themselves. So your question. Again, I'm throwing at Sean possibly because I had discussion with him. He said that because Summit is not possible for every country to organize, it's quite possible for to get some kind of a service provider, kind of a Summit, OpenStack Summit, or OpenStack Meetup, or something like that, if I recollect. Would you like to comment on that? Like you said, February, we might look at India for some kind of service provider meet or something, if I recollect. Not virtual. This is physical. Okay. I know we talked something about this, but I guess I lost a little bit of the flavor of it. Maybe I wasn't completely conscious earlier this week. So explain to me a little bit more about, I guess I'm going to have to get the microphone back to you, what exactly you mean, because you're saying service provider, OpenStack, you're talking about specifically around. Okay. We evaluated the possibility of Summit being in India, and then we came up. I remember that part. Two or three, four times I have presented. What I find is, you need 4,000, 5,000 people to be, you need a facility which is 4,000 to 5,000. Then the second is you need to have some visas and you should have one time flight, because most of the folks come from California, 2,500 or 2,000 developers come from there. So running a developer conference, so you said that this is too big a huge effort. Why don't we come down to just say service provider meet. I say service providers in India, like there are service providers, little ants, idea, and there are other many providers. So for that, can we have a smaller summit so that it doesn't consume so much of an effort? And since we are moving towards NFE, that might be a good idea. That's what you mentioned, if I remember correctly. We're arguing over who's going to answer now. So this is interesting to me because I think we have the same problem in Australia, right? I would love for this event to go to Australia, but I can't see it happening. Mostly because of travel time and costs for US people, right? So what we've done is we identified a local tech conference that was willing to incubate smaller conferences, and we run this day long thing that I mentioned before as part of that event. So they call them mini comps. And that's worked well for us because somebody else does most of the logistical work, and what we do is provide content, you know, speakers and marketing and stuff like that. So I guess my advice would be try and identify what, you know, tech event is successful in your region or segment of the market or whatever it is, and see if they're interested in running an OpenStack Day. There are other examples of this, the Pecona people in Santa Clara in California have an OpenStack Day now too. Because frankly, running a conference by yourself, I did that once for only 800 people. It took two years of my life. It's a massive amount of work. So like leveraging somebody else's event is probably wise. How many user groups are there in India? Is it just one? Just one, but we have a lot of local branches and each branch is autonomous. So we have a committee, we work democratically, right? So we have around 10 cities now, each has a local representative, and then all of us we get together and decide what to do, what direction to take forward. Speaking about that problem, we already kind of have been doing an OpenStack India Day for the last three years. Next year is being planned in other February, March 2015. So we welcome any service providers that want to sponsor us, give us some money. I don't know, it's getting increasingly difficult to do a completely kind of a benign kind of an event, like with no one sponsoring us, because we are getting to 600, 700 people now. And just to provide food and a venue for the whole day. So we need people to sponsor us as well in the past. A lot of vendors have sponsored us, but we kind of need to kick it up a notch and do it on a bigger scale, because just hiring a hotel room isn't cutting it anymore. So we need to grow that and that's why we kind of postponed it from December to March. So it would give us three or four months extra to try and galvanize some support. So it is happening, and if service providers want to join us, that would be excellent. Thank you. I'd add onto that that there's already, I mean, that's how OpenStack started. It started at AusCon, and there's continued to be at LenoxCon, which is called Cloud Open, but it's primarily OpenStack stuff. So that stuff's already happening. So I'd say let's copy that because that makes a lot of sense. So keep it going. We're seeing these kind of events spring up around the world. So Yoshiyama-san can talk about the OpenStack Tokyo Day, which gathered 1,300 people. There was one in Taiwan that did 1,000 earlier this year, Silicon Valley, all of these kind of things. So just to grab another random question off the etherpad. First, how many of you speak or can use a language other than English? Kind of speak German. I think you speak Japanese, right, Yoshiyama-san. Yeah, okay, great. Yes, I know English is difficult. And so one simple question that's cropped up on our etherpad is, should we translate documentation? Anyone want to go on answering that? Yes, the docs team should do that. Typey typey. Unfortunately, my Chinese is not that good yet. I think we are trying to empower to translate the documentation and translate the user interface in OpenStack in different languages. Maybe last time we tried to do something with Serbian and the chat. I think it will work right for the next release. But usually, I guess, most of the system administrators and the users of OpenStack can speak English or understand English. So it is not so mandatory in this Central European region, I guess. Because it requires a lot of resources and a lot of effort to continuously translate everything. I think the question to start with though is not, should we translate? I think the question is, are there regions in the world where not having documentation in the native language is holding OpenStack the adoption back? You know what I mean? I think that's the first thing we got to answer. Obviously, folks from other places could answer that better than I can. I think we have to translate. Most of the technical guys, developers, they don't like translation. They say that English is enough. But for newbies, people who want to discover the project, people in companies who work most of the time with enterprise products, they work with translated, you can find some translated documentations. So I think we have to do it. And the ambassador could help for this in France. We have an active group for French translation with Quebec. And we support this work. I'd like to add that we were colonized by the English for like 200 years. Everyone speaks English, I guess. Also, all the higher education is in English. Like if you want to do university, you can do it in a non-English language, but all technical study, engineering, COMSI, the programs are delivered in English. So I guess we do need some local language translation. But so far, we haven't really received those many requests from the actual user group. I will make it a point to raise it in the next meeting and see if I get any traction with it. So we started writing our stuff down because we were training people a lot. Because the type of people that were showing up and we wanted to help them and we wanted to try to make it as consistent as possible. So fast forward to today, there's a couple of people from Indonesia that really want and have actually used the material we put together their own version because partially to translate but partially they felt the way that we were saying it didn't translate right to the way that Indonesian people thought and looked at this. So maybe there needs to be some different copies of stuff just because of ways people are used to learning in different areas. I think also it's very difficult to translate. The translation is up to date with the official documentation. There are a lack of time with the official documentation and the translation documentation. So for us, it's better to use the English version than the Portuguese version. Yeah, because we just now got the docs team. Well, I shouldn't say just now, but the docs team is to the point where it's sophisticated enough that they just cut stable the kilo documentation a couple of days ago. That's pretty awesome that they have so many people now but to then reproduce that for other languages seems pretty big hill to climb. So I think we've comprehended. Yoshiyama-san, did you want to say something? Yes. In Japan, most Japanese need Japanese document because most Japanese can't read English documents. So first of all, our user group started to translate the documentation and had a Japanese website for OpenStack. And our community is very active to translate OpenStack documentation. So we have Japanese Juno release note and our original OpenStack documentation. So just one last thing. We have vendors who ship in other countries, right? Maybe they have translation resources we could be using. And the foundation also has money. So I wonder like, if say the Japanese user group can get it 90% of the way, maybe we can find a way for the foundation or vendors that sell in Japan to help with the ongoing every time a patch is made, we need to push it across to the other language. So that's an example of a suggestion that the ambassador group might make to the foundation. And as Michael said, the foundation does have money. And these guys are amongst the people that we trust to suggest things that we should be spending money on. So I'd like to see if I can get someone else to perform the very scary task of standing behind a microphone. And I'm looking for something that's more of a request rather than a question. Is there something that the ambassador should be doing for you that they're not right now? Okay, I have a question. I'm from Romania and we're also trying to start up OpenStack Meetups and User Groups. My curiosity is, is the foundation open in sponsoring or helping out in organizing these types of user groups? In the likes of Enno, maybe bringing foreign speakers or stuff like that? You can answer that, Tom. Like a request, right? Can you fly people over? Indeed. I talk after this session, right? I can, we can find some way to start your user group. And I try to give a lot of support because it is my old goal to start something really Romanian because there was some initial user groups in Bucharest as I know, but it is not regular. So the first step would be to chat with your ambassador in Europe. It sounds like Martin might have some ideas already on some people who might be a little bit closer than in America, for example. So maybe you guys should catch up after that and that's exactly the kind of thing that we want to see happening with the program. Yes. I was going to, sorry. No, don't go away. So I don't think that we actually advertise our names anywhere, right? Like not like on the user group page or anything like that. Maybe that's something we need to change. We can put some Blink tags and some animated gifs. I want dancing figures. Just to finish about this question, we can help. I've seen a question about Hub with a local sponsor. We know lots of people, lots of companies. So in the east of Europe, big companies can help in all countries. So we can discuss about this and you can have support for specific meetups to find some sponsors to help you. So our poor audience member has been standing up and down. One quick question. How many ambassadors are there per country? Is that universe of ambassadors or are there more than this side and then are there more per country? I noticed there are two Australians, two Americans. So there's currently 13 ambassadors with a broad geographical area. They're not the same as user group leaders. I don't know if you guys want to take that as a question. How do you interact with the user group leaders? Where do the ambassadors fit? Is that helpful to answer? My follow on is more in terms of we have a women's group and I was wondering if there is an opportunity to recruit some women ambassadors as well. And if that could be, you know, we can broaden it or is it one ambassador per country or that kind of thing? I just thought that might be an interesting request or alignment to take back to the women's group to look at broadening the participation of women with open stack. Absolutely. It's very unfortunate that when we're finding the first tranche of ambassadors, we didn't have a single woman apply and we did try. No, I'm sure you did. I was just wondering if there's an opportunity to expand it or because it sounds, it seems to me just in the last couple of open stack summits that there's just been a lot more inertia there. Absolutely. This program is in its infancy, so yes. Okay, great. Cool, thanks. But I think there was a question there about how you tie in with user groups. I run a user group in San Francisco. So I don't think it's necessarily has to be a one to one, but I interact with a few of the people here on a consistent basis. We don't necessarily always talk specifically about the user groups. We usually talk about community related stuff. So, yeah. So, so the model I kind of the model I've been doing to help. So I'm actually helping out three or four groups right now. And the way I do that is I have a model where each of those groups have a local set of organizers that does logistics and facilities and get sponsored, you know, for for the events and my job because I have happened to know a lot of people, a lot of vendors in the ecosystem. My job is basically to provide speakers. And I think that's something that a lot of us probably can do. We know people in the ecosystem. So if you're looking for speakers, we try to get them to you. One request I have one request Tom is I know a lot of the, a lot of the user groups outside of the US have problems finding speakers. I think I've heard that multiple times now. I wonder if there's a way if we can get people who are willing to can and willing to be speakers to almost kind of publish their schedule of where they may be traveling. Particularly since a lot of the speakers tend to come out of the US in probably a year, whatever. So, so a good example is, you know, I was in London last week, two weeks ago. I'm going to be in Sydney, Australia, you know, next month. So there was a way for me to let people know that and then people can go, you know, we're actually going to have a user group, which like to come and speak up. I'm sure because I think one of the challenges of having speakers fly to another country is who's going to pay for it. So in this case, if I know we traveling different parts of the world ahead of time, and I tend to, then basically my company basically pays for that. So I think having speakers physically at the event is good, and we should do it as much as we can. But we have had some success with, for instance, John Dickinson did a swift presentation over Skype or whatever. So there's also kind of other options available if we know that people need content, but that requires the user groups to actually come and talk to us. We've published that somewhere. Here's some, you know, options for, if that is in fact an issue, right, for people who have content and speakers, we should publish that somewhere with different options and then say, here's the ambassador in your area you can talk to that can help facilitate. I like that a lot. There's a small drawback around privacy. So, but if we could figure that out, I like that idea a lot because I actually did over the last couple of years did travel to a couple of different user groups. I knew I was going to be in the area and I specifically contacted them and said, hey, are you interested in doing X, Y, or Z? And it was pretty successful. Bless you. And then, so if we could do more of that. And I go to enough of these events, I guess it's a little bit easier for me right now because people tend to seek me out more than I have to seek them out. So that's a good problem to have, I guess. But there's no reason why we can't seek them out and say, I'm going to be here. Do you guys, what do you guys need? Indeed. Well, our gentleman in the audience has been standing by the microphone for a few minutes. Apologies for the delay. Being a lot as well. So I don't mind standing here right now again. So in terms of causes, I actually have a request. It's something I've already raised with the foundation personally is if. So one of the things about OpenStack adoption in the greater level is a lot of things of tool support. So there's a lot of other tools outside of the Stackforge or wherever they are. There's a particular company, probably some of you are familiar with HashiCorp. They produce tools like Vagrant and Packer, which are I would say best practice kind of developers tools in their toolbox. But there is no formal association between the OpenStack Foundation and HashiCorp. And as a result of that, the integration support between those different various tools is lacking is compared to if you compare it to something like the integration with Amazon. And I see this as kind of an issue. It's a personal issue for me because these are things that I work with with various customers. So I am trying to help encourage the foundation to have that relationship with HashiCorp so we can improve some of these integrations. That's interesting, right? My employer has a developer relations group and one of the things they do is they go and try and find things like cloud libraries and make sure they have good OpenStack support. So I think Vagrant for instance would make kind of falls into that class of problem, right? But it's hard for that group to identify what tools are lacking. You have support that maybe it exists a little bit but it ain't great kind of thing because they don't use all of the tools. So if there are requests like that, I feel like posting to OpenStack Dev would be a reasonable thing to do. So Phillip's already done that. So I saw that there was a Vagrant thread, but I thought that was from an employee of HashiCorp. Am I misunderstanding the thread? I believe you work for a cloud provider in Sweden, right? Yeah. Okay. Our provider service in Sweden. Yes, I did throw out the thread there into the DevStack. The developers mailing group. I'm doing all I can. I think there's an opportunity doing it the opposite direction rather than going for the top down, doing it for the ground up. That sounds like a pretty good ongoing topic for an OpenStack user group. Yeah, but anyway, especially for Vagrant, I know that an OpenStack plugin exists and it works in some way. I had a presentation about that and we tried out and it was working. But anyway, it is not an officially HashiCorp support. That's kind of main issue is that there's stuff that works, but again, there's a lot of other things. There's a whole tool suite and the integration between those various tools don't work that well because there's no official plugin. So even though it kind of works, it's not as seamless as, for example, if you're working with stuff on Amazon. Okay. So I think I misunderstood you originally then. So what you're saying is we need the foundation to reach out to HashiCorp and be like, hey man, let's do this thing. Okay, interesting. I don't think that's impossible. I'm not immediately aware of who the right person at the foundation is. But in fact, it's probably Turi as like the engineering manager, but yeah, we can chase that. And so this is an example where the ambassadors might connect people with the right people. Exactly what you're supposed to be doing. So with about five minutes left in this panel, I thought I'd throw it back over to the ambassadors. I think we've actually got a really good question up here in purple, which is an existential question first. But I think the second part of that is what you hope to achieve in the community in the coming year. So any comments on that? I want to answer the first question. Tristan hasn't spoken much. Let him speak. No, I think for me, one of the cool things about being an ambassador is kind of a mentor for new user groups and community. So I'd like to keep doing that and like to sort of always like hitch myself to new groups around the place and help them get up to speed. I mean, especially like yourself, Martin can mentor you and obviously, you know, teach you much more quickly to get your user group running from experience. So that's a big part of why I think the user groups exist. Sorry, the ambassadors exist as a sort of a mentoring posse more than anything else. I think I was kind of going to say the same thing, to be honest. Like, I think it's an attempt to scale the user community organically, right? The foundation hypothetically could go and hire 100 people whose job it is to go and organise events that felt very commercial and shout out to you about how great OpenStack is. But successful user groups kind of pop up where they're needed by themselves. And the ambassadors are about trying to support that instead of imposing, oh, there's no user group in Wagga Wagga, we should fix that. You know, maybe there's no demand there. But so yeah, supporting people who are passionate is what this is about to me. I think what I've also noticed is the fact that a lot of people feel isolated when they live away from the US. They don't, they talk to the mailing list, they go to, go on IRC. But it's not as good as personally meeting with some developers in a meet-up somewhere, having a few drinks and you know, just socialising and feeling generally included. Like they, it feels to them like what they do matters and user groups are a very good way of doing it. And as an ambassador, I make sure that if someone does come to me with a problem, I say, look, thanks for bringing it up. I will definitely get someone to speak on it or someone to address that in the next meet-up. And I try and make sure that people feel included. That's a brilliant place to stop actually. We've got about 60 seconds left in this. Who wants to take it out? I can dance if you sing. Brilliant. Well, with no comments left apart from a couple in the etherpad, hopefully we can sort out in this next ten minute break between sessions. Please do come up after the session and introduce yourselves and we'll see how we can work together to help whatever it is you're doing. Let's please thank once again our OpenStack ambassadors. There is one last thing I think we should mention, the community mailing list. So you have questions, you want to talk amongst each other, join the community mailing list and we've monitored as well. So it's a way to talk to the group. Excellent. Thank you very much.