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Open Infrastructure Community Contributor Awards: Denver Summit edition

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

May 1, 2019
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DENVER — The Community Contributor Awards offer recognition to those who might not be aware that they are valued.

These awards are a little informal and quirky but still honor the extremely valuable work that everyone does to make the open infra community excel. These behind-the-scenes heroes are nominated at every Summit 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 during the keynotes. More on the Denver honors below in the words of the community members who nominated them.

There was also special surprise award for Lauren Sell, former VP of OSF Marketing, for all her years of community building.

The “Does anyone actually use this?” Award

Stig Telfer

He works tirelessly to shepherd and corral the Scientific OpenStack SIG. He’s always willing to pitch in with any OpenStack or open infrastructure-related meetup or event, going above and beyond every time. He’s continually putting in extra effort to further understanding of both OpenStack and Ceph at extreme scale, sharing learnings and results with the rest of the community, often engaging with upstream in order to help progress the quality of software that the rest of us get to use. He’s also one of the nicest, most honest people you’re ever likely to meet.

Bug Czar

For the individual who does the most to deal with the bugs no matter how big and ugly.

Sławek Kapłoński
He’s been on point for debugging and fixing a variety of Neutron gate failures during this cycle. Without him, we would have a bunch of bugs sitting around impacting our ability to merge code that all need triaging, debugging and fixing. Thankfully we have had him on deck to deal with that for us.
In particular bugs that end up affecting many tempest runs and represent a real bug in neutron failing to plug vifs properly on instances. Slaweq was able to debug this and get a fix sorted out
Like https://bugs.launchpad.net/neutron/+bug/1808171

Open Infrastructure Shield

For those who push to keep infrastructure projects compatible, open and available to everyone worldwide.

Allison Randal

She was instrumental in getting the project confirmation guidelines drafted and confirmed so the OSF pilot projects could become top-level projects. She lead countless discussions, readily answered questions in public forums and really guided the community through this process.
She has contributed to the future success of all OSF projects. This was not an easy or quick task – the entire community – from Kata and Zuul down to Airship and StarlingX and other open-source projects looking to be successful benefited from her hard work and leadership.

Friends of Mike Rowe, Doers of the Dirty Jobs

Like the TV series, these are hard-working people who earn an honest living doing the kinds of jobs that make civilized life possible for the rest of us.

Carlos Venegas Munoz and Marco Vedovati

Their work on releases and packaging is not super sexy, but super important and often thankless jobs.
Vedovati helped fix and improve the Open Build System (OBS) for Kata Containers.This was critical to make it easier to package Kata for multiple Linux distributions. He also volunteered as a Kat Herder to help the project work through and resolve issues. He made major contributions to the Kata Containers distribution build and packaging process – driving Kata integration into SUSE, as well as making significant improvements to Kata Containers release infrastructure and packaging for other distributions. He also volunteered as a weekly Kat Herder on several occasions to progress and resolve project issues.

Mentor of Mentors

For serious efforts in sharing knowledge with others. It’s easy enough to solve problem yourself, but teaching others how to solve problems is no easy feat.

Samuel de Medeiros Queiroz
It wouldn’t be fair to just recognize him for one thing since he has been contributing to the community for several years and in different ways. He’s been a really strong advocate on OpenStack in Brazil, being one of the referents in the whole of Latin America. He helped organizing OpenStack Days in Brazil, an event that has brought OpenStack to hundreds of individuals in Brazil and in the area. Every year this event has gained a lot of traction and helped lots of people to learn about OpenStack. He is also a great mentor, for Outreachy in the past and now acts as a coordinator for this internship continuing with the effort that started back in 2013. He’s also participated in other mentoring efforts, including the Women of OpenStack lunch and learn events and the Upstream Training. Last but not least, as an engineer he has made really important contributions to the Keystone project and made of that project what it is nowadays. He’s a great example of someone who loves the OpenStack community and deserves recognition.

Hero of the People

Some people stand up for the masses and work to make leadership better. Some people we are happy to call our hero. They make sure community members are heard and understood.

Ian Jolliffe
He’s attended 10 OpenStack Summits and is a member of the StarlingX TSC and he recently served as a member of the Edge Track Programming Committee for the Denver Summit. His contribution to the track included a focus on case studies and technical solutions, which also resulted in more 5G content, which is an emerging topic at the Summit.
Ian is on the StarlingX Technical Steering Committee, he is doing a great job on organizing the group and making sure they spend time on all relevant topics when they meet. He is actively representing the community on various industry events, has a great attention to detail and is nice to work with.

Bonsai Caretaker

These people keep pressing the button to feed the Tamagotchi, keeping it alive.

Gabriela Cervantes Tellez and Salvador Fuentes
They’ve both been fighting the fight and keeping our continuous integration up and running. It’s a thankless job and it’s also one of the most important factors in the success of the Kata Containers project.

The Giving Tree

Always around to give you what you need and help you keep moving forward.

James O. D. Hunt
He’s invested a lot of time in explaining new to contributors the steps needed to get their patches merged.
James is also likely the person that more than anybody else spend the time to make PRs advance (reviews, suggestions, pinging…) When new potential issues come out, he’s also been very proactive in tracking them in GitHub and pinging the relevant people for a opinion/solution.

The Key to Stack City

In some countries an ornamental key is presented to esteemed visitors, residents, or others whom the city wishes to honor. The Key to Stack City is reserved for those who have done much for OpenStack and are truly a friend to all those in the community.

John Dickinson
He not only binds the community together, for many he is the embodiment of the community. The longest running project team lead, a record that is very unlikely to ever be bested, he’s often a contributor’s first contact with Swift and always helpful and welcoming, whether on IRC or in person. He has undoubtedly had the most influence over Swift’s culture, working tirelessly to ensure that contributors’ perspectives and motivations are understood and represented. This both empowers contributors and allows him to recommend collaborators when he sees interests align. As a result, Swift’s community tends to have high levels of trust and camaraderie. John regularly challenges norms. Whether examining human processes, technical challenges, or even just the layout of a room, John is driven to find what works best for the community. While he will give consideration to what has worked for other teams (both within OpenStack and beyond it), he is willing to change tack if an idea doesn’t seem to be working out. He will not accept something “because that’s how it’s always been done.”

 

Stay tuned for news on when the next nominations open!

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