I am announcing my candidacy for PTL for the Release Management team for the Mitaka release cycle. Although I only formally joined the release management team during the Liberty cycle, I have been active in release-related activities for much longer while serving as the PTL for Oslo. I worked with the release and infrastructure teams to develop the release tools and processes we use for Oslo libraries, and applying them to other projects that now manage libraries. I am a core reviewer on the requirements repository, and this cycle I started the work on automating project releases using the new openstack/releases repository. I was also involved in the process of moving server projects away from date-based versioning to using quasi-semantic versioning. Late in the Liberty cycle I started building reno, a new release note management tool, based on some requirements we gathered within the release team. My goal for the release team during Mitaka is to automate more of the work with a review process that allows projects to be self-service, with some lightweight oversight to manage release timing, version numbers, and messaging. I would like to complete the work we have started in the releases repository to allow project teams to ask for releases at any point in the cycle, thereby encouraging them to shift from a milestone-based to “intermediate” release model. Changing release models will reduce the effort required to create a release by removing some of the pressure to synchronize the activities of all projects on milestones and make it easier to release more often, while still giving us the benefits of stable branches for longer-term maintenance of selected versions. Milestones can become guidelines, rather than hard deadlines.