2014 December

Thanks again for being part of the RDO community.

As we head into what is typically a very quiet time of the year for Open Source projects, I want to wish you all a happy holiday season - for those who celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule, or any other Winter festival.

Quick links:

Holiday Slowdown and Stats

This is, as I said above, traditionally a slow time of year. If you take a look at our community statistics page at https://rdoproject.org/stats/ you can see things start to slow down for the Christmas break, with a large number of people taking time off around the US Thanksgiving holiday, and even more time towards the end of the year.

The community stats page is produced by Bitergia, who are the same people who produce the upstream OpenStack quarterly reports at http://bitergia.com/openstack-releases-reports/ but customized to our community, including activity on RDO mailing lists and traffic on http://ask.openstack.org/

Hangouts

We are right now in the process of scheduling Hangouts for the coming months. I don't have anything firm to report right now - watch rdo-list for more news soon. If you'd like to talk about what your company is doing with RDO and OpenStack, please let me know (rbowen@redhat.com) so that I can get you on the schedule.

Meanwhile, you can watch all of our past hangouts at https://rdoproject.org/Hangouts#Past_Hangouts

Upcoming Events

Your next opportunity to rub elbows with a number of the RDO OpenStack Engineering crowd is at FOSDEM - http://fosdem.org/ - 31 January & 1 February 2015 in Brussels, Belgium. Although the schedue isn't yet posted, you can be sure to hear more about this event in the coming weeks, as the various calls for papers close and the schedules are finalized. FOSDEM is the largest Open Source gathering in Europe, and always a highlight of the year when it comes to gathering with colleagues from varied software disciplines.

Following FOSDEM, don't miss Config Management Camp in nearby Ghent - http://cfgmgmtcamp.eu/ - where you can learn about configuration management tools like Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Juju, and many others.

Blogs

The weeks following OpenStack Summit in Paris have been very fruitful in terms of blog posts. You can read some of the posts from members of the RDO community on the RDO blog at http://rdoproject.org/blog/

You should also watch the OpenStack Planet for a broader view of what's going on in the OpenStack community at large, at http://planet.openstack.org/

Questions and Answers

Probably the best place to get answers about anything related to OpenStack, other than showing up at the OpenStack Summit, is http://ask.openstack.org/, where there's not only a huge number of experts waiting to answer your questions, but also an archive of questions that have already been asked and answered, which you can search to see if your scenario has ever come up before.

If you're an expert yourself, please make a New Year's resolution to spend a few minutes every week answering a question or two, and contributing your knowledge back to the larger community.

In Closing …

As always, I'll close with an encouragement to take a moment to connect with the RDO community via one of our many forums:

Thanks again for being part of the RDO community!

– Rich Bowen, OpenStack Community Liaison rbowen@redhat.com http://rdoproject.org