Hello,

on this Monday's (lightly advertised) TWS call Casey raised the question
of helping me with the workload -- specifically asking for job descriptions.

Honestly, I find the answer to this question rather obvious. The
OpenDaylight community used to have a number of people who acted as my
peers, as well as very trusted stand-ins.

Rather than looking for particular CVs, specializations, or whatever, I
(very strongly) believe we need to look at whom we lost in the last 3-5
years. Pretty much every single person in that list filled a role I am
currently standing in for (just because of defaulting).

Without picking favorites, or really implying anything beyond the
example, my mind conjures the following:

- Tom Pantelis, for his dedication to helping wherever he can -- and his
specialty being anything controller.git-related.

- Stephen Kitt, for his amazing breadth of focus coupled with sheer
brilliance and an incredible attention to detail. odlparent.git to
netvirt.git -- Stephen could diagnose just about anything.

- Ed Warnicke/Daniel Farrell, for their unbridled attention to
governance and how we should operate. It is easy to forget, but being
FOSS is all about the principles and giving a fair chance to everyone --
and we simply have no one who could fill the shoes left by these two
guys. We really threw most of our governance out the window for the past
two years and it is *not* a good thing.

- Brady Johnson/Sam Hague, for their undeterred determination to make
the community (and our use cases) work. You might look at them as 'those
app guys', but that would not guard you from being infected by their
dedication to the community.

- Maros Marsalek/Dana Kutenicsova, for very much the same things, except
theirs was a dedication beyond what I have seen in an FOSS project.
Where Maros was always at the ready to help every single user of his
project, Dana excelled at keeping her project utterly documented and
squeeky-clean in every single aspect that could be measured by static
analysis.

- Jan Medved/Tony Tkacik, because honestly, I do not get much in terms
of architecture/implementation review these days. We've been falling
short on depth for years and there is simply no substitute for that.

- Dave Meyer/Colin Dixon, for their community leadership. It might not
have been appreciated in their time, but us odl-timers will always
appreciate the tight clock and 'take it to the lists' attitude. We seem
to be wasting much more time on meetings, and we are just not writing
any emails.

- Dave Ward/Neela Jacques, for their can-do attitude. It might have been
the early days, it probably was forces way beyond our understanding. We
might have felt entitled to rule the world, for all the wrong reasons.
Nevertheless our leaders made us feel there was little beyond our reach
- and that is something we just do not have these days.

Unfortunately the lists don't work as they used to -- which I find to be
a function of all of the above, the new normal, whatever you want to
call it.

I wish I had immediate answers to replacing each of those valued
contributors, but I do not. It is a simple matter of fact that they
brought to the table immeasurable amount of experience coupled with pure
joy at having the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to collaborate in the open.

OpenDaylight has taken on a multi-billion-dollar industry with a fervor
never seen before or since. Many have taken advantage of that fervor,
but for that spark to survive, we need to refresh our ranks with people
dedicated to our cause.

What we can do is to direct funds to a new generation of developers,
unhindered by the past that haunts us al. Let them take reign of our
project, with a fresh perspective and outlook.

Judging from my experience, that will take years to happen, and the best
we can do is to lend all our support to this young generation, even when
they make mistakes, to build a stronger foundation for the future.

PANTHEON.tech has a proven record of contributing to OpenDaylight,
directly or indirectly, while maintaining its principles close to heart.
Our dual mission of serving our customers best interests, while at the
same time evolving OpenDaylight to be the best SDN-or-whatever-platform
out there has never been more relevant, nor critical.

Regards,
Robert