 Hi, sorry for delay everyone, we're here to talk about the paths of becoming an AUC and so we're going to start with introductions, my name is Shamal Tahir, I'm from IBM and I participated in this working group to what started off as non-HTC recognition, but eventually became the AUC recognition working group. And my name is Maysad O'Casing, I work for Cisco as a platform architect based out of Israel and I'm happy to say and proud to say that I'm a contributor to OpenStack that doesn't contribute code. So, perfect. All right, so today we're going to kind of start off with a recap. So this initiative really started about six months or so ago and so what we're going to do is we're going to give a little bit of background on why there was a need for something beyond ATC, what makes someone an AUC, a general update on where we are six months from the beginning and then a future direction of where we're going and then we'll end with just some tactical ways that you can get involved and we'll eventually become an AUC if you do so. So, quick show of hands, how many of you contribute to OpenStack? How many of you contribute code to OpenStack? Okay, so I would say about half the room contributes, a little bit less than half the room contributes code. So today there is two distinct committees defined in the OpenStack charter. One of them is the user committee and the second one is the technical committee. The technical committee encompasses everything which is technical with inside OpenStack, all the projects, all the code, all the infrastructure, everything which has to do with actually developing the software itself. The user committee is a body which was appointed partially by the board, by the technical committee and I don't remember the third person. The third one is selected by the user committee, the first two members select the third. So the three people which were currently appointed to this position a while back and they are efficiently in charge of what we call working groups which are groups which come from the community, which advise or identify certain maybe issues or areas of for improvement with inside the OpenStack suite of software. And most people do it completely on a voluntary basis and they come and they start working on trying to make things better. There are a number of working groups currently defined. For example, one of the working groups was the AUC working group. There's enterprise, there's logging, there is a huge plethora of working groups which meet on a regular basis. Most of them meet on IRC, there's regular logs, there's regular meetings. And these people are very, very active within the community. But there was a need for at least a number of people or there was feedback from the community that operators and users don't really get recognized for the work that they do. The people organized using meetups, they contribute different codes to specific operator, user repositories, git repositories. They participate in these working groups but they're not actually recognized by the OpenStack community. As part of OpenStack, we participate but we don't seem to be part of OpenStack because there's no, up until now there wasn't any kind of way in order to quantify the activity which these people were doing. And they also wanted to be recognized as a contributor. It's also a technical contributor because these people, these users are providing feedback through surveys, through different activities. They're also operators which are providing feedback into the development teams as well. And they would like to also have some kind of technical contribution, because it's not only the fact of people which are organizing meetups, but they're also technical contribution into OpenStack itself. So that was the background of why AUC needed to come about. So as Mej said, there's different roles that we play within the community. And so for AUC, we didn't want to represent one subset of the group of contributors that are not coding to projects actively. So we kind of brainstormed with a bunch of people in the community to kind of come up with a holistic list of what are some of the other activities that people who would be active user contributors actually do in the community. And so this is the full list. So basically we started off with official OpenStack user group organizers. Obviously to organize a meetup on a monthly or bi-weekly basis takes a lot of work, as Lisa and Yusuf can attest to. So we made sure that that is recognized and hopefully benefits from the AUC program going forward. The other part is active members of an official user committee working group. The working groups meet about once a week. Generally there's deliverables just like a project, just like a release cycle. There's deliverables for working groups as well. And so working group members can spend probably upwards of 10 plus hours a week doing this stuff. So it was important to kind of recognize them as well. The criteria, by the way, I'll also state the actual metric. So for official user group organizers, it has to be an official user group, which means is you go through the ambassador program and you work with them to kind of get your work group registered. With OpenStack you adhere to certain conditions and requirements and you become an official. So there's official and unofficial user groups. So this criteria applies to official user groups. For active members of a working group, the criteria is two-fold because some working groups use IRC, others don't. And so for the IRC ones, we basically look at attendance as well as how much you talked in those meetings as well. So it's a collection of either attending a certain amount of meetings in a cycle and also participating actively in the meetings through lines written in IRC, basically. And for non-IRC working groups, we actually contact the working group chairs and we discuss with them so they can give us a list of who their active members are. Generally, the working groups that aren't using IRC use EtherPads. So it's easy to go back and look at that list as well of who is in attendance of the various meetings. Also, we have the ops meetup, which is actually happening today at the summit. But for ops meetups, it's a community-driven thing. It's for operators, by operators. So basically, we get people to sign up as moderators. And so generally, if you sign up and you moderate a session at the ops meetup, that also counts as towards ADUC. Contribution to any repository under UC governance, as mentioned, there's TC and UC. TC repositories are the NOVA, the senders, the glances, etc. The UC repositories are OSOps repo, for example, where you can contribute tools, scripts that you've written to make your life easier as an operator, or even just share best practices. And also, there's a working group called Private Working Group, which also has a user-story repository under here as well. So if you have a concept of a feature that would be nice to have in OpenStack, because it's a pain point for your organization or your market, you can actually write a user-story and contribute it to the repository. And that would also count towards AUC as well. Likewise, contributors to super users. So they're superuser.openstack.org. And on Super User, they basically have guest authors come and help write and craft information in interviews that are beneficial to the community, such as how someone got a cloud to scale or how someone is leveraging containers with OpenStack. And so it's just general knowledge sharing for the betterment of the community. And that takes effort as well. So those could be weeks or two weeks of exchanges that happen behind the scenes to make that happen. So that's also recognized. And then, of course, Ask OpenStack. So Ask OpenStack is a resource where anyone who's using OpenStack or has a general question about OpenStack can post it. And there's a group of people that actually keep an eye out for new questions. And as they come in, using their knowledge, they'll share what they know and try to provide an answer. So Ask OpenStack moderators are eligible as well. The criteria for that is, in Ask OpenStack, there's actually a karma system. So I think the cutoff right now is about, it's 250. It should be 500. But the script is set at 250 right now for karma. And you must be active within the last six months. Because karma doesn't decay. So we make sure that you're active still and you're just not getting the karma and qualifying that way. Also, track shares for some, it's qualify as well. So I think in this past, for Barcelona, there were about 80 to 90 track shares that put together the collective schedule that you see for the event. And those are like three, four meetings. They're sometimes very heated meetings as well, depending on if there is a disagreement. But anyway, those groups get together and even though they're just putting together a track for the summit, that starts a month in advance. And there's constant meetings there as well. And then last but not least, because this is a good list, we believe, as a starting point. But we know we missed something we must have. And so there's also a self-nomination process. So if there's some other way you're contributing to OpenStack that you don't see listed here and you're like, wait, I do something too and it's not here, you can always self-nominate. And there's a review board that will kind of look at that. And actually, we can qualify AUCs that way as well. And the hope with that is that as the system evolves, if we see a self-nomination request for a certain type of activity over and over and over again, then we'll know, OK, maybe we just need to make this a general criteria. So it will help feed the next set of things or criteria that we should be including in the next rev as well. So just one last thing on what Jamal said was the fact, these are things that, of course, people are contributing. They're putting in their time. And so something we have to, the bottom was originally and still is, how do we verify or accumulate, or I don't know the word, how to number five some kind of way, all these things. So of course, if you are contributing, it has to be something, of course, besides, as you said, for these extra AUCs, it has to be something that we be able to count or measure in some kind of way. I'm just writing blog posts. I'm sitting 15 hours a day or whatever at my computer looking at IRC. That's not something that we can quantify. Actually, that's a good point, because yeah, we are looking for quantifiable metrics to tie with the criteria. And also most of the criteria that we have at this point is actually automated via script collection. So that's why metrics also help in that matter as well. So where do we stand currently with the AUCs? For the first time, I think we have some 255 people on their badges, which my badges are over there, but afterwards there's a AUC recognition on the actual badge to say at some reason AUC is a number of 255 people, which were from this list of all these criterias. How many are in this? I'm just curious. Have AUC on their badge? Okay. Good to know. Okay. So of course, in order for all this to happen, there's things have to go up to the governance or the way the open stack actually works. So this was presented, I think, at least the initial draft was presented yesterday in the joint board of directors with the TC and the UC committee to see how we continue with this AUC as an official thing. It was submitted yesterday for approval. There are a number of things which have to change, more legal and language things which have to be adapted to make things more acceptable to the rest of the foundation. And there's still a number of ongoing discussions of what kind of benefits such as perhaps the option of getting a free pass to the summit if you have an AUC like the rest of the ATCs have or voting in an election or a number of other options which is still on the table, which is still being discussed. And that's what we currently stand with a number of AUCs at the moment. This is the first round. It will be something which will continue and hopefully grow more and more as more people participate and become eligible. I think that's, okay. So as Nezha mentioned, so this was discussed. Basically the user committee is rewriting their charter. The AUC body will be the voting constituency of the user committee. So just like in TC elections ATCs vote, in UC elections, once this is approved, AUCs will be the voting party basically. So it didn't go through yesterday because again, there's legal and other things that have to be handled right now. But the board is gonna review it at their next meeting again. And the plan is still intact to hopefully by February, if all goes well, hold the first UC elections. And so AUC would be voting in that. Likewise, there's a need to identify additional criteria. We had like at least four or five come up like right within the last two weeks of trying to get the final count of AUCs. And so for example, women of OpenStack was one where women of OpenStack isn't actually a working group under user committee. But at the same time, they do a lot of fantastic work. And so it was like, it would be a shame not to have women of OpenStack under AUC as well. So we did that last minute change to kind of make that happen. But again, there's probably other criteria in mesh. We'll actually be leading a session today or tomorrow in the Opsa. There's one at the Opsa after lunch. After lunch, yep. To kind of start brainstorming on, okay, what's the next step of this work group? Because this work group is a short-lived work group. We have a scope, which is to help define what AUC is. And so we need to figure out, okay, is our work concluded or is there more work to be done still from the team? And then last but not least, I think as time goes on and we get more and more AUCs, it'll be good and we're gonna talk to the various marketing resources in the OpenStack Foundation. See, if there's a way that we could possibly even do like AUC highlight, like where basically you can have like a subsection or something and just say, okay, every month or every week or whatever, there's enough of us to where you can do it every day almost, just highlight one AUC and say, hey, this is what they're doing. And so just kind of, we're catching up, right? The AUC has been around a while, AUC is just forming. Anything we can do to spread awareness and get more AUC members, I think is in the benefit of everyone. Do you want to cover this or do you want me to? Yeah, so of course, this of course will be available afterwards through the show notes, anybody that doesn't have access, please feel free to either contact Shamal or myself. We'll be very happy to mail you the slide deck as well. What kind of things you can do in order to, if you're not already in AUC, what else you can do for yourself or for also the OpenStack community to become an AUC and contribute more? So of course, if you haven't used a group for some reason, it is not an official user group, there's no reason why it shouldn't become an official user group. Contact the ambassador. Ambassadors or Tom Fifelt? Or Tom Fifelt to see exactly what is still needed on your part in order to get this into the official user groups. And of course that already brings the people which organize to fall under the criteria. If you haven't joined up to one of the user committee working groups, there are a number of things going on from anything to architecture, to logging, to product, to user stories, to there's a huge list of whatever you feel. I'm sure something will be up your alley and you'll be something which you'll be able to participate and are willing to participate in those different kind of fields. If you have done something with OpenStack that you would like to share, for example, if you wrote a LogStash filter in order to get normal information or some kind of information out of the LogStack or a monitoring tool or a deployment script or whatever it might be, please contribute it to one of the user, the UC GitHub repos, which will also allow you to become eligible for the UC. If you're very interested in sitting on forums the whole day or you don't have very much work to do, which I'm sure we all do, help people out that use ask.openstack.org. That's also another way. And of course, you can also share something that you've done with OpenStack. As you can see, the link over there is to go to superuser.openstack.org, contact the people what you would like to talk about, what you would like to share, something that you do with OpenStack, which is amazing, not so amazing, a good story, a bad story, whatever it might be, please feel free to share because this is something which everybody would like to know and learn about. Yep, absolutely. And before we move on to Q&A, I would like to take a second to recognize the other AUC recognition working group members in the room. So Megan, Lisa, Danny, they were all tremendously helpful in this process as well. So thank you. So yeah, so AUC again is a net new thing. Right now, we just have the little stickers on the badges. Hopefully once the user committee charger changes, we'll get voting rights. And then in the future, there's conversations about, okay, how do we get some of the other benefits that are historically ATC-oriented to be more generic to be ATC and AUC, hopefully in the future. So with that, any questions? Yeah, sir? If you don't mind, mic to the mic. Easier, thanks. Okay, I have two questions. The first one is, the links on the first page are important to me, but I cannot see the URL. So, will the stack be available to us? The deck, we can definitely share it. I don't think the foundation posts decks. They just post a video if I'm not mistaken. But... I mean, the first page, there is no HTTPS URL. Oh, got it. And is there a plan to make the AUC contribution to be realized on stack analytics? Like called a computer? Yeah, so that was actually one of the things that was discussed, was basically using the metrics and feeding them into stack analytics. So just like you can see number of commits, reviews, you could go in and see number of working group meetings or meetups organized, et cetera. So that is actually still in the works. We just, this cycle, we spent more on defining the criteria, but I think next cycle is going forward, we're gonna get more of us. And actually, the foundation is actually, as I mentioned, we're using scripts to collect all this data. They've actually built a backend system already that can automatically periodically update who the AUCs are. And then one of the goals that they have right now is to be able to show AUC status as well as activities on a person's member profile on the OpenStack.org page. So when you go to OpenStack.org, you'll be able to see this person is an AUC and what activities they're participating in. But stack analytics is definitely, something to discuss is just level of effort is a lot higher, so I think we'll get there eventually. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. Okay, just one more point I would like to point out. It's not only the fact of getting something from the AUC, it's also the fact of being recognized as part of the OpenStack community. It means also having more, not I would say influence, but more of a voice of what happens with OpenStack. A number of us are operators or people which are running into different kinds of issues of how OpenStack is deployed or how OpenStack is written or how certain component is written and so on and so forth. And the fact of having an AUC body as well which will provide as a voice to the OpenStack community to say this is something which is not really working properly and there's a number of people which agree with us and this thing has to be changed. That's also not only the contribution of getting something from OpenStack but also giving back into OpenStack to make it a better product and a better solution. All right, thank you. It's a wonderful week in Barcelona. Thank you. Thank you.