I’ve been leading an effort with Alan Clark to define “what is OpenStack core” for the Foundation Board.  Now that I am sitting here at OSCON and celebrating OpenStack’s third birthday, I think it’s a great time to bring the general community into the discussion.

There is significant history behind this topic.  According to Foundation governance, the Technical Committee (TC) defines which incubated projects are integrated and the Board of Directors (I am one) determines which of the integrated projects are labeled as core.

When it comes to the core label, the stakes are high.

Defining core is a convoluted topic.  To make it digestible, I’m breaking it down into multiple blog posts over a series of weeks:

1. Why do we care about core?
2. Decomposing the problem (“the spider”)
3. Insights from decomposition (healthy tensions in OpenStack)
4. 12 Positions: A Common Framework (I recommend ready the list of 10 instead)
5. Community Feedback at OSCON 
6. “What is Core” the visualization
7. Where I think this is going, OpenStack’s Test Driven Core
8. Core Positions Refined: the 10 positions behind the core visualization (above).
9. Videos (most >90 mins).  The online meetups are easier to follow.
   1. 9/5 OpenStack Core Meetup in San Antonio
   2. 9/22 OpenStack Core Meetup in NYC
   3. online: 10/16 Online Meetup (daytime) and 10/22 Online Meetup (evening)
10. Thinking about how to Implement OpenStack Core Definition

Too much reading?  At OSCON, Rafael Knuth shot a video of me talking about “what is core.”