Hi everyone, I'm not really sure how to start this conversation, so I'm just going to jump right to the point. I am writing to the Cyborg community and the Technical Committee to discuss the current state of the project and share my intent to help ramp up maintenance efforts for this cycle and beyond. I recently discussed this briefly on the #openstack-tc channel, but I wanted to bring it to the public list for broader visibility. Now that the new year has started, I am reaching out to express my intent to spend time contributing to the health and maintainability of Cyborg over the next few cycles. If I'm being entirely honest, it does not feel like it has been 18 months since I started down the same path with Watcher, but I have been asked to try and restart Cyborg development in a similar way as we did with Watcher. Recently, I have been submitting patches and performing initial code reviews, but it is clear that review latency and accumulated technical debt have become significant bottlenecks. To help unblock the project and prepare for future development, I am volunteering to lead a focused cleanup effort. My primary goals for this cycle are: 1. Addressing neglected technical debt and stale patches: I have already identified several critical areas including oslo.db and oslo.service compatibility, microversion-parse naming, and the long-overdue eventlet removal. I have also identified a backlog of bot-proposed patches for release notes and .gitreview that need manual intervention. 2. Improving CI/CD stability and alignment: While we have made progress moving failing jobs from Jammy to Noble and adding Python 3.13 support, significant debt remains. For example, the cyborg-tempest-plugin lacks stable branch jobs post-2024.2 while still carrying EOL branch definitions. We also lack grenade/SLURP upgrade testing which is vital for project health. 3. Managing release-related work and project metadata: Cyborg needs active management for release note preludes, marketing highlights, and RC/GA tagging. Furthermore, our Launchpad project requires cleanup to ensure bugs and features are tracked against the correct series, and team ownership needs to be aligned with current OpenStack standards. Note: I have checked PyPI (https://pypi.org/project/openstack-cyborg/) and it is correctly owned by openstackci from what I can tell. We are close to the end of the 2026.1 cycle, so my immediate priority is fixing the critical gaps to ensure Cyborg's inclusion in the 2026.1 release, followed by a longer-term plan for maintenance in 2026.2 and new feature development. To execute this, I am requesting that the core team consider adding me to the cyborg-core group. I am also volunteering as Release and TACT-SIG liaison for the remainder of this cycle. For 2026.2, I propose adopting the Distributed Project Leadership (DPL) model to better distribute these responsibilities. One or two others who have been helping me revive Watcher over the last year will be joining me in this effort over the coming weeks. We hope to split the release, TACT, and security roles between us to ensure consistent coverage unless we get other volunteers :) Our overall goal is to restart the Nova-Cyborg integration work to improve the accelerator management UX (attach/detach, move operations, etc.). To reach that point, we must first pay down technical debt and rebuild an active core review team. I have prepared a high-level maintenance roadmap and task list here: https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/cyborg-maintance-2026.2 which I intend to use to track this work. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. The first step should probably to discuss this at the next tc meeting and to follow up with the existing core team for comment. If there are no objections, I will coordinate with the TC and Infra team regarding the necessary permission updates. Regards, Sean