Now in its seventh year, the OpenStack Summit has refocused itself, moving from an emphasis on original designers of OpenStack’s open platform cloud-building technology to include customers and community users. Now that OpenStack has matured, there are fewer conversations around the technology itself and more about how to best use it, especially in regard to containers and networking.

“They’re calling [this summit] the ‘open infrastructure’ conference. This is what OpenStack has become,” said Lisa-Marie Namphy, OpenStack ambassador and community architect.

Namphy spoke with host Stu Miniman (@stu) and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer) of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during theCUBE’s Day 2 kickoff of OpenStack Summit in Boston, Massachusetts.

In addition to discussing how the summit has changed over the years, they also talked about Namphy’s role as an OpenStack ambassador and open-source communities in general.

The power of user communities

The San Francisco Bay Area has the world’s largest OpenStack user group, with more than 6,000 members. Many of its members are located outside the Bay Area or even internationally, but they join the group — including via live-streamed meet-ups — because of its vibrancy and compelling content.

Namphy runs the Bay Area OpenStack user groups and is one of 20 ambassadors worldwide. OpenStack looks for its ambassadors among people who are not just running a local user group, but also if they have a brand in OpenStack, speaking to groups, inspiring and advocating for open-source technology.

The OpenStack foundation has done a great job in the past few years of acknowledging the contributions of the user community, who are not always code contributors, Namphy stated. Many in the industry contribute in significant ways, helping to nurture and grow the community.

“Open source doesn’t work without a community,” Namphy concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of OpenStack Summit 2017 Boston.

Photo: SiliconANGLE