Hi InStackers,

I have to apologize off the bat as I haven't been putting out much IOSUG news this year but I'm fairly sure as OpenStack so rapidly continues to grow around the world that you are being well fed with project updates. What a year it's been. Definitely the year that OpenStack's user adoption has really hit the accelerator pedal, and some great new projects have been blossoming. It's getting harder by the day to keep up with it all. Who'd have thought Oracle and now possibly Salesforce are joining the project!!

I am running for the position of the Individual Board Director this year to try and represent the Indian community and our group. Please extend me your support so we can be better represented at the international level. I feel like we have not had a focus on India and other parts of Asia are getting that focus. I would like to bring more events to India, including more hackathons and beginner boot camps. More details follow in the email.

Thanks to our Organizers for 2013

I'd firstly like to thank the awesome people that have helped organize our meetups around the country this year. We've had an injection of new ideas, thoughts and venues into the meetup routine this year, and we are going to more cities this year and reaching out to more students and professionals.

Thanks to our Sponsors for 2013

I next need to thank our sponsors for this year. We have many more companies wanting to sponsor in 2014, so I'm really pleased to see this and we have a job to do as organisers to ensure our sponsors get represented well for their generosity. On request of the sponsors, I want to ask everyone if they are ok with us having a short sponsor section within our newsletters where we can inform the group of regionally relevant information from the companies that support our group?

OpenStack Ambassador Program

Recently the OpenStack Foundation launched the OpenStack Ambassador program, and I was very fortunate to be accepted in the initial group of 12 Ambassadors. Basically the program aims to create a framework of community leaders to sustainably expand the reach of OpenStack around the world. If you want to know more about the program, please take a look at the wiki at https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Community/AmbassadorProgram. It's open to anyone to apply!

Individual Member Director Elections in January

Individual Member Director elections for the 2014 Board will be held Monday January 13, 2013 to Friday January 178, 2013 (US Pacific Time, so Tuesday to Saturday for AEDST). You must have joined the OpenStack Foundation as an Individual Member by July 21, 2013 to vote in the January 2014 election, per the bylaws. If you are an eligible voter, you will receive an email with a link to complete your ballot when the elections open on January 13, 2013. To ensure you receive the ballot, please log on to the website at http://openstack.org/profile and make sure your information is current.
I’m really hoping to serve another term and I feel like there’s still lots to be done to represent Australia on the Board and make sure international matters are front and centre of the agenda. There’s some strong competition in the candidacy this time round so I’m hoping you all can throw me as many votes as you can!
All the election details are available at http://www.openstack.org/election/2014-individual-director-election/

Proposal for a User/Operator focus at the next OpenStack Summit

I recently put forward a proposal to build on the work of the OpenStack User Committee user surveys and hold a - Users/Operators day preceding the next OpenStack Summit. I'm of the impression that our Australian OpenStack community is predominately User/Operators over Developers so I really want to ask for input of the experiences you've had using OpenStack. The day will be to build on the good work of the OpenStack User Committee's 6 monthly User Survey and look at the project as a whole, to feed back experience to the developers. More info and the discussion thread is available at http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack/2013-December/003850.html

OpenStack Training

The OpenStack Foundation recently launched an OpenStack Training Marketplace at http://www.openstack.org/marketplace/training/. As well as many in-class courses, there are some online courses to pick from. If you want some training materials in the meantime or don’t want to attend a course, head to http://docs.openstack.org/trunk/training-guides/content/ where an open source training manual initiative is being worked on to provide training materials for everyone, especially those whose location or economics prevents access to professional courses. They are looking for contributors to continue to build the manuals too, so if you can help out there, please do.

I look forward to a great 2014 and seeing as many of you as possible for meetups in the next year! Here’s hoping that we can double our ranks this year!!

regards,

Kavit