What's new in the world of OpenStack Ambassadors

The OpenStack Ambassador Program is excited to welcome two new volunteers, Lisa-Marie Namphy and Ilya Alekseyev.

Ambassadors act as liaisons between multiple User Groups, the Foundation and the community in their regions. Launched in 2013, the OpenStack Ambassador program aims to create a framework of community leaders to sustainably expand the reach of OpenStack around the world.

Namphy will be looking after the United States. She first joined the OpenStack community in 2012, while leading the product marketing team for the OpenStack technology initiative at Hewlett-Packard. Later, she became the San Francisco Bay Area OpenStack User Group organizer and has been running it for the past three years.

Prior to becoming an Ambassador, she has made considerable contributions to the OpenStack community with a book published on OpenStack, speaking sessions at seven Summits, five OpenStack Days and recorded dozens of video interviews on OpenStack. She have also taken part in building the SF Bay Area OpenStack community to nearly 6,000 members.

Namphy tells Superuser that she believes 2017 will be the year of OpenStack adoption. Her goal is to encourage user groups and their organizers to make this a priority initiative as they build their communities. Furthermore, she hopes to mentor fellow community leaders in creating robust communities like the San Francisco Bay chapter.

Alekseyev will be looking after the Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States. He started working with OpenStack in December 2010, when he made proof-of-concepts for potential customers at Grid Dynamics, also working with a team to contribute to Nova. In addition, he has coordinated the Russian translation team. Alekseyev also helped launch and organize meetups and conferences devoted to OpenStack in Russia and creating User Groups in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan and Kazakhstan.

Alekseyev’s goals include to further develop user groups in his region and help them meet the official User Group requirements. In addition, he hopes to organize OpenStack days in his region and facilitate relationships with local universities, other open source and cloud communities, which he hopes will engage new users. Lastly, he will continue his work on promoting OpenStack resources in Russian for the Russian-speaking community.

We’re very excited to have them on board. We also bid a farewell to two valued members of our Ambassador team, Kenneth Hui and Sean Roberts. Both of them achieved fantastic things while with us.

Kenneth initiated and mentored the Philadelphia, Maryland and Florida user groups, while also growing the New York City user group to become one of the longest running. In addition, Kenneth contributed to organising the OpenStack Architecture Guide book sprint as well as representing the OpenStack project at various conferences and meet-ups.

Roberts has long been a vocal participant in our meetings and along with Namphy stewarded SFBay, one of the largest OpenStack user groups.

We are grateful for their work and the legacy they will leave for our newcomers to build upon.

If you’re interested in becoming an ambassador, you can apply here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc0TWAPr32S5CNh0mvYyYH4vZY-rEF6bWUZ9KhwMbXjq3jovw/viewform

Sonia Ramez recently joined the OpenStack Foundation on the community management team as an intern. She’s working on the user group process and the Ambassador Program.

Tags: community