Hi everyone,

I've been on the OpenStack Technical Committee forever, and my
original plan was to not run for re-election this cycle. Thanks to
name recognition, incumbents have traditionally easily been reelected.
Stepping down is the only way to make room for new leaders to emerge,
a process that is necessary to keep alignment between the Technical
Committee members and the active contributors that are their constituency.

So, having room for new members to be elected is necessary. At the same
time, there is value in historical perspective, and experienced members
are useful to help newcomers into their role. We also need to be careful
about the message that too many people stepping down would send. So, it's
a mixed bag -- we need enough, but not too many people stepping down.

Over the past cycles, we introduced about 3 new people at every election.
I think renewing 3 or 4 people every 6 months in a committee of 13 members
is the right balance. We already have three experienced members who
announced they would not be running again this cycle, so I feel like it
might not be the best moment for me to step down.

With the OSF shifting from being solely about OpenStack to more generally
tackling the open infrastructure space, my focus has certainly expanded
lately. But I don't want to feed the trolls arguing that we are leaving
OpenStack behind. I'm not done with the OpenStack TC yet, and would like to
advance two more things before stepping down.

OpenStack is in the middle of a transition -- from hyped project driven by
startups and big service providers to a more stable project led by people
running it or having a business depending on it. A lot of the systems and
processes that I helped put in place to cope with explosive growth are now
holding us back. We need to adapt them to a new era, and I feel like I can
help bringing the original perspective of why those systems were put in
place, so hopefully we do not end up throwing the baby with the bath water.

I feel like there is also a lot of work to do to better present what we
produce. The work on the OpenStack map and the "software" pages on the
openstack.org website is far from complete. OpenStack is still much harder
to navigate and understand for a newcomer than it should be. I want to
continue that work for one more year.

So I am announcing my candidacy for a position on the OpenStack Technical
Committee in the upcoming election. Thank you for your consideration !

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)