In my work at Dell, Technical Meritocracy means that we recognize and promote demonstrated talent into leadership roles. As a leader, one has to make technical judgments (OK, informed opinions) that focus limited resources in the (hopefully) right places. Being promoted does not automatically make someone right all the time.

I believe that good leaders recognize the value of a diverse set of opinions and the learning value of lean deliverables.

OpenStack is an amazingly diverse and evolving community. Leading in OpenStack requires a level of humility that forces me to reconsider my organization hierarchical thinking around “technical meritocracy.” Instead of a hierarchy where leadership chooses right and wrong, rising in the community meritocracy is about encouraging technical learning and user participation.

OpenStack is a melting pot of many interests and companies. Some of them naturally aligned (customers+vendors) and others are otherwise competitive (vendors). The vast majority of contribution to OpenStack is sponsored – companies pay people to participate and fund the foundation that organizes events. That does not diminish our enthusiasm for the community or open values, but it adds an additional dimension

If we are really seeking a Technical Meritocracy, we must create a place where ideas, teams, projects and companies can pursue different approaches within OpenStack. This is essential to our long term success because it provides a clear way for people to experiment within the project. Pushing away alternate approaches is likely to lead to forking. Specifically, I believe that the mostly likely competitor to any current OpenStack project will be that project’s .next version!

Calls for a “benevolent dictator” imply that our meritocracy has a single person with perspective on right and wrong. Not only is OpenStack simply too complex, I see our central design tenant as enabling multiple approaches to work it out in the community. This is especially important because many aspects of OpenStack are not one-size-fits all. The target diversity of our community requires that we enable multiple approaches so we can expand our user base.

The risk of anointing a single person, approach or project as “the OpenStack way” may appear to streamline the project, but it really stifles innovation. We have a healthy ecosystem of vendors who gladly express opinions about the right way to implement OpenStack. They help us test OpenStack technical merit by finding out which opinions appeal to users. It is essential to our success to enable a vibrant diversity because I don’t think there’s a single right answer or approach.

In every case, those vendor opinions are based on focused markets and customer needs; consequently, our job in the community is to respect and incorporate these divergent needs and find consensus.