Hello everybody,

I am announcing my candidacy to be a member of the OpenStack Technical
Committee (TC).

I have been involved in open source since I was a brash youth on the
Internet in the late 1990s, which amounts to over half my life at this
point. I am a self-taught individual, cutting my teeth on BSDs of the
period. I operated in that area for a number of years, becoming a
'shadow' maintainer under various pseudonyms. As time progressed, I
became comfortable attributing my work to my personal identity. o/

My direct involvement with OpenStack began during the Folsom release, as
an operator and deployer. I focused my efforts on automation, eventually
falling in with a crowd that likes puns and cooking references. In my
professional life, I have served as developer, operator, user, and
architect, which extends back to the birthplace of OpenStack.

I am a founding member of Chef OpenStack[0], where I have dutifully
served as PTL for five releases. My community involvement also extends
outside the OpenStack ecosystem, where I serve as a member of Sous
Chefs[1], a group dedicated to the long-term care of critical Chef
community resources.

Though my hands-on experience goes back several releases, I still view
things from the outside-looking-in perspective. Having the outsider
lens is crucial in the long-term for any consensus-driven group,
regardless of that consensus.

Regardless of the election outcome, this is me taking steps to having a
larger involvement in the overall conversations that drive so much of
our daily lives. At the end of the day, we're all just groups of people
trying to do our jobs. I view this as an opportunity to give back to a
community that has given me so much.

Thank you for your attention and consideration,
Samuel Cassiba (scas)

[0] https://docs.openstack.org/openstack-chef/latest/
[1] https://sous-chefs.org/