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Help bring key contributors to the Open Infrastructure Summit with the Travel Support Program

Donate to the program for the Shanghai event.

July 18, 2019
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Most of us are more frequently awash in the glow of a monitor than actual sunlight, but we all know how much gets done talking to people in real life.

You can help bring more key contributors face-to-face at the Open Infrastructure Summit in Shanghai by donating to the Travel Support Program. Individual donors can help out by donating at registration for the November 4-6 event. If your organization can contribute to the Travel Support Program, check out the sponsor prospectus.

“It takes somewhere between $2,000 and $3,ooo to send someone via the TSP program to an Open Infra Summit. If 20ish people donate $100, that’s one more person able to attend,”  the OSF’s upstream developer advocate Kendall Nelson said in an impromptu fund-raising thread on Twitter. “Consider donating when you go to register.”

For every Summit, the OpenStack Foundation funds attendance for about 30 dedicated contributors from the open infrastructure community.  These include projects like Kubernetes, Kata Containers, AirShip, StarlingX, Ceph, Cloud Foundry, OVS, OpenContrail, Open Switch, OPNFV.   In addition to developers and reviewers, the program welcomes documentation writers, organizers of user groups around the world, translators, forum moderators and even first-time attendees. Applications for Shanghai are open until August 8, 2019.

TSP grantees from the previous Summit in Denver provide a typical snapshot. The committee picked a diverse group: five nationalities, of which five are Active Technical Contributors, two are Active User Contributors, four are Active User Groups members and the group as a whole contributes to 11 projects.

After every Summit, Superuser profiles the TSP grantees and ask them how it went. Invariably, they say the real-world connections and interactions make them more productive community members.

“The OpenStack community is spread all over the world. We work every day using mostly IRC and experiencing the difficulties of interacting with people in different time zones,” said Rossella Sblendido, software engineer at SUSE and Neutron core reviewer, who traveled from her native Italy to the Tokyo Summit on a TSP grant.

“The Summit is the only time when we’re all there in person at the same time. It’s really crucial to exchange ideas, coordinate and get ready for the next release. Being there makes the difference.”

Photo // CC BY NC

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