Open Stack

It's time again for the PTL elections, and I'm throwing my hat in the
ring to lead the Community App Catalog project (https://apps.openstack.org).

During the last election cycle I made a few promises which I believe
I've delivered on.  We've continued to operate entirely in the open
including holding weekly meetings on IRC along with bringing a few
issues to the mailing list when I felt we could benefit from opinions
of a broader audience. Another bit of success is that we've adjusted
the schema to support additional asset types, and have received our
first in this category in the form of a TOSCA template[1].  We still
have work to do on the web site in order to actually show additional
asset types in addition to adding that capability to the App Catalog
Horizon plugin, but that work is in progress.

The other significant effort was to implement a legitimate API, which
is now showing promise via the work to implement GLARE as the back
end[2].  In fact we will have a working PoC by the summit in Austin -
and we'll certainly complete that work before the following summit. I
will do everything I can to make sure the folks working on this get
all the support they need.

Looking ahead to the next cycle, the two biggest things the Community
App Catalog needs are a clarified mission and a whole lot more
publicity.  I'm guilty of living in my own bubble here, assuming
everybody must wake up thinking about the catalog after dreaming about
it all night long (just like me!)  But it turns out there are plenty
of people in the community who haven't even *heard* of the Community
App Catalog. I realize I need to work a lot harder to bring attention
to our efforts here.  What we've built can benefit most OpenStack
projects, and should become the standard place to host assets noted in
our documentation. There are many other ways we can all be using the
Community App Catalog to benefit OpenStack as a whole, and I'll start
to discuss and debate my ideas on the mailing lists in the weeks and
months to come.

Speaking of clarified mission, I intend to work within our own
community to build consensus around what we mean when we say "an
OpenStack App".  I believe if we can start to agree on that, and agree
on the best way(s) to package and distribute such things, the
Community App Catalog will become much more valuable to a larger
audience very quickly.

I think the Community App Catalog has tremendous potential; if you'll
have me as PTL again I'll keep working my hardest to deliver!

[1]: https://review.openstack.org/289132
[2]: https://review.openstack.org/276857

The official elections PR is here BTW:
https://review.openstack.org/#/c/291496/

-Christopher