On the CCIF unkeynote and open cloud community

On a more serious note Reuven Cohen's taking the stage for an unkeynote at the Cloud Computing Expo in New York City, in which he will drop the original topic (Unified Cloud Computing, which got dangerously close to revealing reveal some "acutal work" linking Amazon EC2 with Enomaly ECP) in order to talk about, wait for it... the future instigation activation creation of a group that has already existed for the best part of a year... a process which I am told by someone who should know will take 6-12 months.

That's right folks, even though it's April Fool's day, this one's for real - he's actually going to get up on stage and "publicly ask for the support of the greater community in the creation of a completely new kind of cloud computing trade association", which will be "focused on the marketing and advancement of cloud computing industry", save that the majority of the 800 or so Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) members won't be there.

Smells like yet another old school trade association to me, especially since one of the committee told me yesterday that it would have to be a 501(c)(6) organisation (Business Leagues, Chambers of Commerce, Real Estate Boards, etc.) in response to my raising the issue yesterday. Forgive me for being cynical after all that's happened this week, but that's just the Cloud Computing Alliance they were planning to dump on us up until yesterday with a slightly different wrapping.

On Thursday at the CCIF Wall Street event they plan to go over the details again including Governance (e.g. @ruv's official post-Instigator title and what to do with the money), Goals, Platform and Marketing Efforts, in an otherwise vacuous agenda. Once again the actual CCIF community over here will learn about the outcome in a blog post diligently pasted into the group a day or two later and will almost certainly not be given the opportunity to contribute. In fact if I understand yesterday's update well, the most contentious issues (such as a to-be-announced relationship with IEEE-ISTO) have already been decided by the self-appointed leadership team who lack the mandate to do so.

My point is not to criticise them for the sake of it, rather to encourage fellow community members to critically assess what is forced down their throatsproposed for creating a truly open cloud computing community. This is something I've been working towards all along (ironically, against the very people who now propose it) and something I for one have a lot of experience with. While I'm glad Reuven's finally on board with the "open cloud community" idea (a "melting pot" where both users and vendors come together to share ideas") I'll be disappointed if he claims it as his own (like the manifesto which did more damage than good.

Let's take our time and make sure we get this right - the Thursday "deadline" is arbitrary and self-imposed and getting some actual deliverables would be far more beneficial. If this is mishandled the repurcussions have the capability to be far worse and longer-lasting (WS-Deathstar anyone?).