The future of OpenStack operators meetups and community

In the before times, OpenStack operators met several times a year to network, exchange experience and to bring feedback to the OpenStack development community based on experience of using OpenStack in production at scale. OpenStack operators meetups happened in many places including : New York, London, Berlin, Tokyo, Mexico City, Boston, Barcelona, Philadelphia, Vancouver

Since the pandemic, however, and with shrinking travel budgets, in-person meetups have become extremely rare. On the other hand, interest in OpenStack is growing again. 

We'll take a fresh, no-holds barred look at the status quo and discuss what might work for the community in this new reality.

Notable achievements of past community meetings included much tech knowledge interchange, but we also successfully drove changes in how long OpenStack release documentation is kept on-line and productive discussions of why installations lag the latest releases. These discussions highlighted acute operator needs in a way that eventually lead to the long-term maintenance branches of OpenStack and then more recently the SLURP upgrade process.

It seems potentially valuable to restart this community.  However, the old assumptions about how the community should stay in touch no longer hold. The community has lost many longstanding members whilst others have returned and yet more potential new community members are arriving given recent events in the competitive landscape.

Many operators are not on the mailing list and do not do IRC. Some can perhaps be found on LinkedIn, some on Slack, some on Mastodon. Some video meetings are on Zoom (non-free), some on Jitsi.

Let's see how much OpenStack operators community we can find and work out how, where and what to organise.