Hello everyone,

I would like to announce my candidacy for the role of PTL of Glance for Newton.

1. Personal Commitment
My employer will be giving me 100% time to focus on this role and I do not
intend to take other roles within the community for the sake of focusing on the
development and progress of our project. I am as much of a community developer
as I like being a software one and of late, I've been focusing hard on the
first more. Thanks to this community I was given the challenging yet
interesting task of leading Glance through a difficult phase of an identity
crisis during Kilo timeframe. We've come quite far, addressed many concerns and
are making good progress therein. However, there's a lot ahead of us like the
recent image locations usage confusion, where tasks are heading and what do
image sharing plans look like. This keeps me driven and interested in the
development of Glance.

2. Themed Focus
For newton, we already have over a dozen solid proposals for summit sessions
[1] and I expect a few more. While we welcome all the feedback that we can
possibly get in such face to face conversations, it will be essential deriving
priorities out of them. Without a doubt, we've import refactor work, Nova's
support of v2 API as top priorities. Those will be the encompassing
development goals for Newton. However, any software project has some general
changes that sometimes become critical if not fixed in a limited time frame and
we've seen that happen multiple times over the history of the project. I would
like to divide those into the following focus areas: security, stability,
feature additions, performance, maintenance, testing, usability, and
cross-project. Not all the dimensions of the project will have proposal talks,
we will still encounter refactors and bugs for each. Sometimes those bugs are
heavy to handle with multiple hundred lines of code per review. Historically
Glance core being a overall low bandwidth team, we are likely to get
bottlenecked in one of these areas. I would like to work with the team during
the summit to help prioritize an item for each dimension so that everyone is
aware and thinking of what's coming their way for reviews. This will be a
discussion that involves themed focus to help establish a good review cadence.

3. Enablement
Always! I've always been a fan of enabling folks to do their job, discover
their interest in the project and help move OpenStack as a whole in a positive
direction. I think processes help but sometimes they become too hard to deal
with. I believe the most productive environments are the ones where people who
are driven & active get opportunities to take important decisions in their
focus areas while being hit with appropriate trade-offs from partners and the
vantage point is provided by the PTL.

4. Collaboration
Glance being a service consumed by many OpenStack services, we are a team that
needs to be actively engaged in cross-project meetings, initiatives, and ad-hoc
syncs. Import refactor work, deprecation of v1 API and building of
compatibility layer for Glance requires a ton of cross-project involvement with
DefCore committee, Nova team, etc. Also, the momentum Glare is getting with its
consumers will need quite active participation in the respective syncs. I have
recently taken a co-lead role for the cross project effort on quotas mainly
with the objective of shaping the right quotas semantics for Glance but also to
help the bigger OpenStack community in the process. I will give up this co-lead
role and help the members with a smooth transition and keep myself involved
from purely Glance perspective to ensure my full attention to the project.
However, I hope to achieve more collaboration with the help of other team
members in all the different areas.

5. Finding equity to the unbalance
I believe we've had a good number of drives in OpenStack, developer driven
cycles, operator driven cycles, and user-driven cycles. There's a ton of value
to each of these three legs of the tripod on which OpenStack services stand.
Nonetheless, in a core OpenStack service like Glance, I strongly believe that
we need to find the center of gravity of this tripod in order to balance the
development dance. In Newton, I plan to start a broadcast communication channel
for the use of all the three legs namely developers, operators, and users. We
already have the MLs and IRC media of communication that fulfill the unicast
and multicast requirements. I find blogs to be more representatives of personal
opinions rather than a medium of project updates. I plan to interview the
active developers, interested operators & users on their work & perspectives;
publish the update transcripts publicly on non-textual media for a hands-free
consumption. The most important reason for this proposed initiative being
communication of intent and not just of the information, and my observation is
that lack of communication of intent is an important reason for many livelocks
in the OpenStack people problem realm.

[1] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/newton-glance-summit-planning

Thank you for reading and for your consideration.

Nikhil Komawar