Open Stack

The Heat project pioneered the concept of rotating the PTL for every 
development cycle, and so far all of the early (before 2013) developers 
who are still involved have served as PTL. I think this has been a 
*tremendous* success for the project, and a testament to the sheer depth 
of leadership talent that we are fortunate to have (as well as, it must 
be said, to Thierry and the release management team and their ability to 
quickly bring new people up to speed every cycle). We're already seeing 
a lot of other projects moving toward the PTL role having a shorter time 
horizon, and I suspect the main reason they're not moving more rapidly 
in that direction is that it takes time to build up the expectation of 
rotating succession and make sure that the leaders within each project 
are preparing to take their turn. So I like to think that we've been a 
good influence on the whole OpenStack community in this respect :)

(I'd also note that this expectation is very helpful in terms of 
spreading the workload around and reducing the amount of work that falls 
on a single person. To the extent that it is possible to be the PTL of 
the Heat project and still get some real work done, not just clicking on 
things in Launchpad - though, be warned, there is still quite a bit of 
that involved.)

However, there is one area in which we have not yet been as successful: 
so far all of the PTLs have been folks that were early developers of the 
project. IMHO it's time for that to change: we have built an amazing 
team of folks since then who are great leaders in the community and who 
now have the experience to step up. I can think of at least 4 excellent 
potential candidates just off the top of my head.

Obviously there is a time commitment involved - in fact Flavio's entire 
blog post[1] is great and you should definitely read that first - but if 
you are already devoting a majority of your time to the upstream Heat 
project and you think this is likely to be sustainable for the next 6 
months, then please run for PTL!

(You may safely infer from this that I won't be running this time.)

cheers,
Zane.

[1] http://blog.flaper87.com/post/something-about-being-a-ptl/