I'm announcing my candidacy for a position on the OpenStack Technical Committee.
For those of you who don't know me yet, I'm Flavio Percoco. I'm currently
employed by Red Hat and I've been in the Technical Committee for the last 2
years.

I truly believe my work as part of the Technical Committee is very much a
community work as it's a technical work. I'm personally interested in finding
ways to evolve our community while still empowering people to do technical work,
improve themselves, and be amazing. My work as a member of the Technical
Committee has always followed this belief and so do the following points that I
believe we should keep working on:

#1 Keep getting rid of any tribal knowledge there could exists

Our community has had a significant growth over the last years and as people
come and go I believe it's extremely important to document our culture, our
beliefs, and to clarify our vision.

More projects are being (or going to be) added to the big tent in the future.
This set of projects are diverse in technology, scope and goals. My experience
as a mentor throughout the process for on-boarding new projects has been that
there are still uncertainties in our community, especially for folks that are
not as familiar with it. What does it mean to be part of the community? What am
I expected to do and/or behave like? What is good/bad CI? Can I use other
languages? are just examples of questions that come up. Some of these have be
answered, others still need some work.

#2 Cross-Community engagements and interactions

I'd like to dedicate more time on building bridges with other communities like
Go's, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, etc. I believe there's a lot we can all
learn from each other and the more we work together, the more we'll improve our
technologies/communities and the more our users will benefit.

As part of my tasks during the 2016-2017 period, I worked on a reference
document which describes the process to add new languages in the community. This
means that, given a good use-case, it's possible to add/create projects that use
other languages that are not adopted by the community yet. This work started of
as a request from the Swift team and evolved into how can we enable the
community to experiment and explore new fields outside of "what we know". I find
this exploration and experimentation critical for OpenStack's growth as a
community and as a technology.

I'd like to extend what has been done with the new language additions reference
document to other communities and technologies. To be more specific I'd like to
help building bridges and making sure the right processes for interacting with
other communities like CNCF exist and that such interactions are happening.

#3 Containing the Big Tent bubble

Several new teams have been added to the big tent, and I believe this is
great. I also believe that some teams are not meant to exist forever. Some
teams play a role for a limited amount of time and this is good too.

As part of evolving our community and making sure we communicate the right
message, I believe we should do constant checks on our team structure, how we
can re-organize these teams (if needed) and how we can keep the list clean.

I'm personally more interested in the re-organization part of the process. How
we can encourage collaboration on some areas that happen to have more overlap
without affecting negatively the mission of the teams involved.

#4 Communicate more

I am part of the communications working group in the TC. We focus on
communicating as much as possible the things that happen in the technical
committee reviews and meetings.

This effort slowed down quite a bit in the last couple of months but I'd like to
pick it up again and build a new team of writers to make sure all the
discussions happening at the governance level will reach as many community
members as possible.

I believe in this community, I believe in this technology and I believe we've
done a great job moving the community up despite all the downs we've had. I
believe there's still a lot we need (and can) do and that there's a lot of
excitement to have in this community.

Thanks for reading thus far and for considering me as valid candidate. If
elected, I will keep working on my current tasks and the ones I just mentioned
as part of this candidacy. I hope you'll help me improve while we all work on
improving OpenStack. Regardless of the result, it has been an honor to serve
y'all thus far.

Rock on!
Flavio