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OpenStack Community Contributor Awards: Vancouver Summit edition

A lot of behind-the-scenes work goes on in the community–these awards put a medal on it.

May 24, 2018
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VANCOUVER — On the last day of the Vancouver Summit, the Community Contributor Awards gave a special tip of the hat to those who might not be aware that they are valued.

These awards are a little informal and quirky but still recognize the extremely valuable work that everyone does to make OpenStack excel. These behind-the-scenes heroes were nominated by other community members.

There were three main categories: those who might not be aware that they are valued, those who are the active glue that binds the community together and those who share their knowledge with others.

OSF’s upstream developer advocate Kendall Nelson runs the program and handed out the honors at the Summit feedback session.

 

Jay Pipes – Key to Stack City

For the “I get knocked down but I get up again” award for the fantastic work on OpenStack placement… a really challenging technical piece of work which is setting the framework for the future. Pipes has been contributing to the OpenStack Nova project, one of the cores of where OpenStack started for almost seven years.  He’s constantly involved in the community, talking directly to operators about their usage and gathering feedback to bring into the development cycle.

Jens Harbott – Bonsai Caretaker
Harbott managed to tackle not just one, but TWO help-most-wanted items. He stepped up to help maintaining our project infrastructure, becoming a new infra-core in a previously under-served region (Europe). He also stepped up to help the Designate project and is now Designate core reviewer!

Stacy Veronneau – ‘Does Anyone Actually Use This’ Trophy
He helped to reboot and fuel the Canadian OpenStack community. He is our first ambassador and also a mentor with the OSF mentor program. He deserves recognition because he has put a lot of effort and time into our community and still does.

Clay Gerrard- ‘When Do You Sleep’ Award
He has worked tirelessly for years on the Swift project. He’s one of the hardest working devs and one of the key components to the great culture we have inside the Swift team. Time and time again I’ve seen him spend hours answering mailing list questions, responding to bugs and mentoring new contributors through code reviews and in channel. He still manages to spend hours giving detailed and thorough reviews from his years of dev and OP experience on this project. He’s definitely a huge contributing factor to the quality of the project. He does all this, yet is still working on developing some highly complex Swift improvements…
To top it all off, he’s very humble. He’s one of the backbones of our community, a key factor to the great team culture and cohesion of our team and continues to work tirelessly behind the scenes.

Adam Spiers – Bonsai Caretaker
He helps everywhere — beyond his direct involvement as the Self-Healing SIG lead, he has been fixing things here and there, getting involved in the PTGbot, StoryBoard… He somehow still finds the time to pursue a major musical career as a talented cellist. I suspect he has a twin also called Adam.

Mark Voelker – Open Infra Structure Shield
He has really helped the Interop working group grow and thrive through out multiple years. He is always working on patches, whether he is flying to his next meeting or staying up late into the night. Without him, the Interop WG would not survive. Thanks!

Marcos Sungaila – Mentor of Mentors
He’s one of the top OpenStack professionals in Brazil. In addition to the excellent work he performs, he never refuses to share his knowledge and always offers great insight into OpenStack. He contributes a lot in terms of spreading the word and teaching Openstack in Brazil.

Matt Riedemann – Smiling in the Face of Adversity Cup
He has been involved in OpenStack for years. A long-time PTL for OpenStack Nova, he’s an extremely resourceful person who’s always willing to go the extra mile to help people out. He takes pride and ownership of the OpenStack Nova project and takes a personal responsibility in the OpenStack ecosystem and he’s an extremely valuable member of our community.

Father Vlasie – The Don’t Stop Believin’ Cup
For implementing the micro-installation of three nodes, one controller and two compute nodes that powers the St. Photios Orthodox Theological Seminary in Etna, California. Stay tuned for an upcoming Superuser feature on his OpenStack journey.

Croke Park Hotel – The Giving Tree
As many might know at this point, the fallout of the winter storm Emma during the Dublin PTG was that the original venue had to close due to a Red safety warning being issued by the Irish government. They did everything with a smile, while sleeping on cots in the hotel. I didn’t hear a single negative comment from any attendees. They joked with us, they engaged us on social media. They became part of our family and we must recognize this, for our family, our community is not just developers… but developers, operators, users and those who interact with all of us.

Stay tuned for news on when the next nominations open!

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