I would like to announce my candidacy for election to the OpenStack Technical Committee. By way of introduction, I am[1] a relatively recent arrival to OpenStack; I've been working on Trove since just before Icehouse. I was the PTL of the project for the Newton cycle, and was recently elected to a second term as the PTL for the Ocata cycle. I am also active in the Stewardship Working Group (SWG)[2]. I believe that a place on the TC is an opportunity to serve the OpenStack community. An important aspect of leadership is something called 'servant leadership', the notion that leaders are there to serve the rest of their constituents. This is also a concept central to the SWG which I am a part of. If elected to the TC, it would be my privilege to serve all of you. What does that mean? The charter of the OpenStack Technical Committee[3] charges the TC with providing 'technical leadership'. There are however a number of questions that must be answered such as "What is OpenStack", and I submit to you that these are not necessarily just 'technical'. The TC has been spending a lot of time trying to answer some of these. Some of this makes total sense, but then there are are questions about what 'maturity' is, and who an 'active reviewer' is. The TC has been spending an inordinate of time trying to decide what metrics or attributes of a contributor it can measure, and then proceeding to define activity and maturity in terms of those things. I submit to you that these latter things are a huge distraction. In the process, I believe that there are significant 'technical' issues that have paid the penalty, for example the notion of cross project goals (series goals [4]), one that I strongly believe are meaningful and within the scope of the TC. If elected to the TC, I would like to use my position to urge the TC to spend more time on the important things like "How do we make OpenStack better for users", and "How can we make a cross-project goal for python3 work", and less of its time on the distractions that have been numerous of late. In a nutshell, I'd like to put more of the "technical" back into the "Technical Committee", and re-focus it on serving the OpenStack community, the very essence of Stewardship. Thank you for your reading, and I appreciate your support, and giving me the opportunity to SERVE YOU on the Technical Committee. -amrith [1] http://www.openstack.org/community/members/profile/15733 [2] https://governance.openstack.org/resolutions/20160705-stewardship.html [3] https://governance.openstack.org/reference/charter.html [4] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/349068/