Howdy,

I am announcing my candidacy as Chef OpenStack PTL for the Newton release cycle.

In the Mitaka cycle, we've accomplished quite a bit, with an incredible velocity.
The core cookbooks underwent a significant refactor, removing some 18k lines of
code and refactoring another 4k lines. We also saw the introduction of
integration tests in our gates, as well as some third-party vendor support
in Liberty. With the initial round of refactoring completed for Mitaka, we have
a more streamlined set of cookbooks upon which to build additional features.

Being under the big tent is not easy, and we have great challenges in front
of us. My main goal for the Newton cycle is to further reduce the barrier to
entry to the cookbooks, so that we can more easily welcome new contributors
and hopefully more adoption.

- Documentation
I'd like to place an emphasis on more documentation. I believe that this
will enable downstream developers and operators to better uptake newer releases
as well as contribute back to the project. Our users need better guidance when
it comes to best practices when using the cookbooks.

- Continuous Integration
We've done a lot on CI, with the integration jobs, but we must also test
different deployment scenarios as proof of concept that a downstream user can
take these same cookbooks and deploy a production-ready OpenStack cluster.

- Community engagement
I would like to further our collaboration with other projects, notably
OpenStack Infra and upstream packagers (Ubuntu Cloud Archive and RDO), but also
other OpenStack projects like Heat, TripleO, Magnum, Tempest and Documentation.
This collaboration makes the OpenStack ecosystem better by providing more
freedom of choice for users when deploying OpenStack. We must continue that
with coordination and maintaining strong lines of communication.

I would greatly appreciate your support for the PTL role for the Newton cycle,
and I'm looking forward to growing the Chef OpenStack team.

Samuel Cassiba (sc`)