# Cassandra Summit and thoughts about the Cassandra project

I attended Cassandra Summit 2023 in San Jose California. I had a variety of reasons for attending, but for the purposes of this report, I was there to speak with project leaders and get an idea whether the project is being managed in a vendor-neutral fashion.

Overall, I came way feeling that the project is welcoming of a corporately diverse community, that the main leaders in the community represent many different vendors, and that the project is working towards expanding the committer pool.

Yes, there is still work to be done, and the bar to committer is higher than one might wish. But I think that the reasons given for this are valid, although I do believe the project should work towards addressing those problems, rather than routing around them.

I talked with several people about the Cassandra Catalyst program, and am persuaded that it is a stepping stone on the path to committer, not an alternate to committer. It celebrates contributions, and creates belonging, in a set of people who, historically, have walked away from the project.

The growing emphasis of AI seems to be bringing more contributors to the project, most of whom are backed by large vendors. The content at the event seems to indicate that, at least for a subset of the AI interest group, Cassandra is the de-facto data store for AI models. The Cassandra project has rallied around this message, and this has brought in a larger user pool, some of whom are on the path to committership. But mastering the code to the point of becoming a committer is, by all accounts, a significant undertaking, and this reduces the pool of people who are likely to reach that hurdle.

I continue to have concerns about Planet.Cassandra, and heard a handful of cases where DataStax representatives said things that implied that DataStax is the one true source of Cassandra wisdom and expertise. However, this was not a position that the rest of the community seemed to support in any way.

So, in summary, yes, there are still concerns, and some remnants of the old days, but that movement is definitely occurring in the right direction.