As I sit here preparing to cross the Atlantic, I am pondering on what we’ll do in barcelona.

This will be my… (stopping to count on fingers.. running out of fingers…) 11th Summit. Back in the Essex days, I was communicating about Juju whilst working for Canonical. It was a fantastic experience to see some of the same communication methods we had used at Ubuntu Developer Summits, and new ones, coming together to form this massive community.

This will be the last summit where we ask every technical contributor to join the fray. An evolution of the process is under way, which has been called the Project Teams Gathering. So this may be the last time we do it the way it has always been done, with technical contributors mingling with business folks at the OpenStack Conference. There are some concerns about this, some even expressed by me. But I trust those who have been formulating this plan to be dilligent at iterating on it to improve our throughput.

And the reason I trust them is that I have seen one constant throughout successful Open Source contributors. We all communicate. I take it for granted how well we actually communicate, given how distributed we are, and how few shared objectives we have. But I think what separates a pet project on github from an Ansible or OpenStack sized project is contributors who communicate early, and communicate often.

So, I am very much looking forward to this upcoming summit. I expect that we will all do our best to communicate by listening, recording, reflecting, and adding our voics. But I am also quite excited to see how the new format works out not only at the PTG in February, but also the next Summit in Boston.