This year we introduced a new class of non-voting members of the Foundation called the Associate member class. It was created on June 29, 2021 by a resolution of the Foundation Board of Directors, in an effort to recognize and work closer together with two types of organizations.

The first type of Associate members is non-profit organizations sustaining open infrastructure projects. Open infrastructure goes beyond our Foundation, and we have been collaborating closely with numerous adjacent organizations over the years, sometimes becoming affiliate members of those organizations, engaging in co-marketing opportunities or sharing events. But until now we did not have a way to recognize and promote that collaboration on our end. Several organizations like OW2, the Ceph Foundation, the Open Source Business Alliance (home for the Sovereign Cloud Stack project) or the SODA Foundation have signed up on this new program.

The second type of Associate members is notable academic and public research institutions making extensive use of open infrastructure projects. Since the early days of OpenStack with NASA’s direct involvement, our Foundation has a long history of working closely together with academic and public research organizations, supporting them in their usage of open source solutions for their infrastructure needs. Several prestigious institutions have joined this program since its inception, including CERN, ARDC (home for the NECTAR cloud in Australia), Boston University, Oregon State University, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Monash University, or IMT Atlantique.

If you are interested in joining this program, please reach out to [email protected].

You can read the full 2021 OpenInfra Annual Report here!