MetaCloud to
ok an awesome initiative to highlight the most influential people of OpenStack. What better way than to ask the community to vote for the most influential people and the community voted too. MetaCloud made a nice deck of playing cards with 54 most influential people, which was sought like hot cakes at the summit! Kudos to Nikki/ Scott/ MetaCloud!
I can’t believe nobody has blogged about it yet. I don’t want to steal Nikki’s thunder either, but here are my thoughts on the card deck. I want to be clear that this reflects my views on how community voted and not on MetaCloud. I have only great praise for Nikki and MetaCloud for this effort.
Real Influencers Made it!
Wow, look at those that made it — Boris Renski, Randy Bias, Nikki Acosta, Chris Kemp,Vishvananada, Jesse Proudman, Troy Troman, Monty Taylor (and more than I can list here) — they are all great people. They are THE face of OpenStack. They have been instrumental in shaping the community, influencing OpenStack’s direction and guiding it this far. Anybody who’s using OpenStack, developing for OpenStack or doing something with OpenStack is most likely to know them.
Lack of Diversity
What surprised me and to an extent angered about the community was lack of diversity. Only 4 women among 52, no person of color and no representation from APAC. Really only 4 women? As a community, we have a lot of work to do in this aspect. We are getting better with the Women of OpenStack efforts, lots of user groups getting represented at the summit. But we need to more. I am hoping we will see more women in the list next time, more people of color and at least some representation from non-US, non-EMEA regions. If not, we would have failed to an extent.
Some really deserved didn’t make it :(
I expected to see great people like Subbu Allamaraju, Kavit Munshi, Rob Hirschfeld, Devananda, Hui Chen, Gretchen Curtis, Lydia Leong and more. May be the community voted based on employee loyalties largely. May be we will do a better job next time.
Some surprise entrants
Honestly, I couldn’t understand why few made the list. You probably already know who they are (rather, you didn’t know about them until you saw them on the cards:)). Hey, that’s how democracy works!
It only shows that we need to ensure the deserved get the visibility they deserve
Summary
I would like to thank Nikki and the team for this amazing effort. It was very nice to see the influencers getting recognized. I hope this effort continues and the community votes better next time!