Two ways to contribute to OpenStack to make a big impact

At the previous Summit, I met with various companies that were both new and community veterans. Both types asked a very common question that just about everyone in the community has: Where should I contribute in OpenStack to make an impact?

The OpenStack Technical Committee (TC) met soon after and came up with the Top 5 help most wanted list.

Companies looking for excellent ways to contribute upstream should give these two priorities (so far!) a good look:

Documentation owners

Complexity in deployments for new adopters can happen. It’s essential that we have good documentation to support our operators and users in our community. Future code contributors coming to OpenStack will also appreciate being able to use the software that they helped make great.

Without a doubt an important part of our community, the documentation team has been struggling with resources since the dawn of OpenStack. The community is now moving forward on decentralizing documentation for OpenStack services — the idea is that each service owns its documentation.

Interested? Contact the Documentation PTL Alex Settle (asettle) or the TC sponsor for this item Doug Hellman (dhellmann) on Freenode IRC. (If you’re new to IRC, read this first.)

Glance contributors

Glance, an early OpenStack project, is deployed in almost every OpenStack cloud since it’s needed by Nova to boot instance for managed images.

The Glance team is struggling to find new contributors to tackle its technical debt. It’s a great project to get started in OpenStack — they’ve been a welcoming project to interns, junior developers and senior developers alike.

Interested? Join the Glance IRC channel (#openstack-glance) or reach out to the Glance PTL Brian Rosmaita (rosmaita) or the TC sponsor for this item Flavio Percoco (flaper87) on Freenode IRC, or start a new email thread on the OpenStack dev mailing list using the tag [glance].

What else?

While the TC continues to evaluate suggested priorities in the future for inclusion, there are a few other ways you can help out upstream now:

Support teams beyond Docs (Infra, QA, release management, stable maintenance…)
Other small teams hungry for resources beyond Glance (Keystone, Designate, Horizon…)
Inter-project work (drive features across multiple projects, champion release goals, participate in working groups like API Working Group or Stewardship Working Group.)

Mike Perez is the cross-project developer coordinator at the OpenStack Foundation. You can find him as as thingee on IRC and Twitter.