Much is made of the large community aspect of OpenStack, and with great reason: the community was created by end users (cloud service providers and large enterprise) with the active participation of large computing vendors and many other open source projects. In less than a year, OpenStack has become arguably the largest open source cloud project.
At the end of June 2010, the OpenStack community boasted 217 registered developers and 80 contributing companies. These 217 registered developers have been very active. In just the month of June 2010, OpenStack Compute (Nova) had 1,382 commits by 65 people, OpenStack Object Storage (Swift) had 101 commits by 12 people, and OpenStack Image Registry (Glance) had 164 commits by 12 people.
The OpenStack community is extremely active and maintains many outlets for information about the project:
Forums for active discussions on all OpenStack projects are located at http://forums.openstack.org/.
The OpenStack wiki is hosted at http://wiki.openstack.org/StartingPage and is updated almost daily with new information.
The official documentation for each of the OpenStack project releases is available at http://docs.openstack.org/.
Mailing lists for OpenStack are detailed at http://wiki.openstack.org/MailingLists. Each of the lists are targeted to different audiences and have different volumes of email.
Launchpad is the current home for source control and project management and is located at https://launchpad.net/nova. In the future, the codebase may be moving to http://github.com/.
Blog posts from OpenStack developers and prominent community members are aggregated at http://planet.openstack.org/.
Active, real-time discussion about OpenStack projects are held on IRC on the #openstack (general OpenStack discussions) and #openstack-dev (developer-oriented OpenStack discussion) on Freenode at irc://freenode.net/. As noted in the documentation, “This is usually the best place to ask questions and find your way around. IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat and it is a way to chat online in real time. You can also ask a question and come back to the log files to read the answer later.” The logs are available at http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/irclogs/.