Let's take a break from presidential politics for just a moment to consider an election that is happening much sooner, and will probably be much more fun for everyone involved.

The OpenStack Foundation received over 1,500 submissions for speaking sessions at the upcoming Barcelona Summit, and they need your help in deciding which ones to choose (well, they probably don'tneed your help in a traditional sense, but it's a big part of their open source culture to include members in setting the agenda). So as is their custom, they've set up a voting site. You can find it here: https://www.openstack.org/summit/barcelona-2016/vote-for-speakers/.

Have you voted yet?

If not, I encourage you to scoot on over and take a look at the incredible array of topics and speakers at the site. And don't be freaked out by the 1,500 thing. Nobody expects you to read all those abstracts. Just hit the drop-down menu on the left-hand side of the main voting page, and choose the track that appeals to you. That will narrow it down to several dozen abstracts-still a lot, especially if you're interested in multiple tracks-but a lot more manageable than 1,500. Then pick what you like.

Piece of cake. No debates. No angry tweets. No fighting with family members over the Sunday afternoon BBQ. Just an opportunity to shape the agenda at one of the most worthwhile, informative conferences you'll attend all year.

Want to know which topics Cisco speakers have submitted? I'll tell you, but it comes with a caveat: No ballot box stuffing! The Foundation is trying really hard to prevent big companies (and little ones with a lot of hustle) from swaying the results with voting campaigns that have very little to do with genuine topic interest and a lot to do with just wanting to get their own employees up on stage. To that end, the Foundation no longer provides direct links to each talk. So if you see something from the list below that truly interests you and that you'd like to see on the final Summit agenda, you actually have to search for it on the voting site by name in order to select it. A little less convenient, yes, but probably smart on their part. It'll weed out most of the recreational voters pretty quickly.

Happy voting. I hope to see you at the Summit!

Architectural Decisions

Wizard -Generalized Execution Service in Cloud Computing, Debojyoti Dutta, Komei Shimamura

Big Data

Build a Self-healing OpenStack Cluster using Cognitive,Marc Solanas Tarre, Xinyuan Huang, Johnu George

Multitenant TensorFlow on OpenStack, Marc Solanas Tarre, Xinyuan Huang, Johnu George

Case Studies

Case Study: Cisco Intercloud, Yuming Ma, Shyam Bollu, Alex Sorokunov (NetApp/SolidFire)

Cisco Intercloud Migration from Ceph to Swift While in Production, Johnny Wang, Martin Lanner (SwiftStack)

Sungard Availability Services: Building a Multihypervisor Cloud with Automated Network, Mike Cohen, Jason Plank

Swift Deployment Automation in Cisco Intercloud, Johnny Wang

Why We Chose OpenStack as our Hybrid Cloud Management Platform, Mike Cohen, Madhura Maskasky (Platform9), Blake Parker (AVG)

Cloud App Development

Crafting Your App with OpenStack Orchestration, Hart Hoover

Deploying Apps on OpenStack: Things We Found While Playing Around, Hart Hoover, Anne Gentle

Let's Learn Go!, Christopher MacGown

Cloud Models and Economics

Are You Scared of Isolation? Think About Alliance, Arvind Tiwari, Ken Owens

Bite Off More Than You Can Chew, Then Chew It: OpenStack Consumption Models, Jon Kelly, Walter Bentley, Tyler Britten

Community Building

Making Meetup Magic: Growing the OpenStack Community Through Local Events, Gary Kevorkian, Kenneth Hui (Rackspace), Tassoula Kokkoris (IBM/Blue Box), Lisa-Marie Namphy (HPE)

Containers

A Journey to Use Kuryr in Private Cloud, Liping Mao, Ian Zhang

Dev and Ops -Separate Islands No More!, Karam Sivia, Amit Sharma

Monitoring Engine for Linked Containers and Application Stack, CB Anantha Padmanabhan, Rahul Upadhyaya, Meenakshi Sundaram Lakshmanan

OpenStack is an Application! Deploy and Manage Your Stack with Kolla-Kubernetes, Ken Wronkiewicz, Ryan Hallisey, Michael Jastzebski

Setting Up Your First Microservice Application on Shipped with OpenStack, Nick Hayward

WAN Optimization Using Docker Containers, CB Anantha Padmanabhan, Rahul Upadhyaya, Meenakshi Sundaram Lakshmanan

Cultural and Organizational Change

How OpenStack Changed an Engineer's Life, Hector Morales, Faustino Aranda

Inside the Developer Persona: What are They Thinking?, Ali Amagasu, TBD

Developer Tools

?Por que no los dos? Container and VM Images with Packer, Hart Hoover, Jason Smith

Getting Started

OpenStack Techtorial by Cisco, Hector Morales, Faustino Aranda

Hands-on Workshops

Getting Started with OpenStack,Charles Eckel

How to Write a Network Function and Deploy in your OpenStack Cloud in less than 30 minutes!, Sumit Naiksatam, Hemanth Ravi (One Convergence), Dinko Mitic (Sungard)

How To and Best Practices

Cisco: Testing Strategies for OpenStack-based Production Cloud Platforms, Manisha Yeshwanth, Mohan Natarajan, Saravanan Kuppuswamy

DevOps on Cisco Metapod OpenStack Cloud, Srinivas Tadepalli, Prateek Tripathi, Chris Riviere

Kraken CI Platform -How to Strain Your Code and Sleep Well at Night, Alex Altman

OpenStack and Infrastructure High Availability for a Production Deployment, Rama Nishtala

Put Applications/NFV Performance Optimization Intelligence Into Your Cloud, Ian Zhang, Liping Mao

QoS QoS Baby, Anne McCormick, Robert Starmer, Alka Sathnur

Two Years of Running a SaaS on OpenStack, Marc Solanas Tarre, Xinyuan Huang, Johnu George

How To Contribute

The Path to Becoming an AUC (Active User Contributor), Maish Saidel-Keesing, Shamail Tahir (IBM Cloud)

HPC/Research

Driving Science in the Hybrid Cloud with Ansible, Steven Carter, Jason Grimm, John Lothian

HPC on OpenStack -Real-World Deployments and Use Cases, Steven Carter, Jason Grimm, John Lothian

Hybrid HPC on OpenStack -Virtualization, Bare Metal, Containers, and Microservices, Steven Carter, Jason Grimm, John Lothian

IT Strategy

Cloud Strategies for Greater Business Impact, Enrico Fuiano

Future of IT -How DevOps and Microservices will Disrupt Enterprise IT, Balaji Sivasubramanian

Networking

Container Networking Strategies in OpenStack, Naveen Joy, Rohit Agarwalla

Deploying IPv6 in OpenStack Environments, Shannon McFarland

Network Policy Enforcement Based on Cloud Identifiers, Sebastian Jeuk, Gonzalo Salgueiro

Networking-vpp: A Simple Open Source Networking Driver for Neutron, Jerome Tollet, Ian Wells, Vincent Jardin (6WIND)

OpenStack in Reference Implementation for Next Generation Network Services, Charles Eckel

Practical Neutron: A Hands-On Lab, Vallard Benincosa, Chris Riviere

Resolving the SR-IOV Connundrum for NFV, Mandeep Dhami, Mike Cohen, Amit Bose

Sharing Your Driveway With Neighbours The OpenStack Way, Ian Wells, Adrian Hoban (Intel)

Troubleshooting Network Issues in Docker Networking Environments, Sebastian Jeuk, Rohit Agarwalla

Operations War Stories

War Story: How We Built a Scalable and Reliable Neutron Driver, Ivar Lazzaro, Robert Kukura, Amit Bose

BrokenStack: OpenStack Failure Stories, Jon Kelly

RabbitMQ at Scale, Lessons Learned, Matthew Popow, Wei Tie, Weiguo Sun

Ops Tools

Adiuvo Bot -Smart DevOps Using Bots for Effective Triaging and Operations, Yathiraj Udupi, Rahul Ramakrishna

Cisco Litmus: Test the pH of Your Cloud!, Dave Spano, Kieran Spear, Russel Sim (Aptira)

Debugging OpenStack Networking Reloaded, Amit Saha, Ramaraja Ramachandran

dotStar -A Tenant-Centric Tool for OpenStack Ops Monitoring and Analytics, Jim Huang, Omer Ansari

Effective Distributed Monitoring and Load Balancing Using Consul, Rahul Ramakrishna, Yathiraj Udupi

Maat -Adaptive System Configuration and Recovery with Predicates, Noel Burton-Krahn

Massive Data Plane and Storage Scale at Your Fingertips with KloudBuster, Yichen Wang, Alec Hothan

OpenStack Discovery and Assurance, Koren Lev

Orchestrate Once, Deploy Everywhere, Ken Wronkiewicz, David Wang

Products and Services

Cisco Cloud Center Architecture with OpenStack, Hector Morales, Faustino Aranda

Identity as a Service for Cisco Cloud, Klaas Wierenga, Krishna Athur, George Chogovadze

Policy Driven Red Hat OpenStack Platform with Cisco ACI, Muhammad Afzal, Iftikhar Rathore

Security

Leverage Ironic to Secure Bare Metal Service, Rajesh Kharya, Vishwanath Jakka

Telecom and NFV Strategies

Building a Highly Scalable Fast Forwarding Application Stack Using OpenStack, Wojciech Dec, Frank Brockners

Gluon -Accelerating Development of New Networking Services for OpenStack, Ian Wells, Tobais Ford (AT&T), Jeff Collins (Ericsson), Marco Rodrigues