Over the last year, we have been trying to create the perfect virtual event configuration to support our community contributors as they meet and build software that runs in production. After feedback from the community, we are excited to announce that for 2021, we are deconstructing the annual OpenInfra Summit and turning it into a series of weekly online, interactive events called OpenInfra Live.

OpenInfra Live is a weekly hour-long interactive content series streaming to the OpenInfra YouTube channel on Thursdays at 14:00 UTC (9am CT) that will replace the normal 3-4 day Summit. We kicked off the event today with a Community meeting on the Wallaby release. The upcoming episodes feature more OpenInfra release updates, user stories, community meetings, and more open infrastructure stories: 

• April 22nd: A behind the scenes look at the OpenStack TC meeting at the PTG
• April 29th: Airship 2.0 Release 
• May 6th: A Global Connectivity conversation to highlight Magma and Open Infrastructure Foundation’s involvement in the community
• May 13th: Large Scale SIG 
• May 20th: The StarlingX 5.0 Release
• May 27th: Zuul in Production User Story

In the future, we also plan to post the videos on Tencent Cloud, explore local language options for our global community, consider additional time zones as well as launch a lighter version of the normal CFP process in order to engage the community and make sure we are covering relevant topics and engaging in ways that the Summit usually would. 

As we have seen over the last year, virtual PTGs are working well in their current format, in fact the next PTG is happening next week with 45 project teams signed up to participate! Considering this, we are not planning to make any major adjustments with that program this year.

If you have any topics you would like to propose for an upcoming episode, please share your ideas with us! 

Thank you to the global community’s support as we have explored virtual event configurations to find the best way for our contributors to meet, exchange ideas, and build open source software that runs in production.