Adding amrth candidacy for Trove

This email is to announce my candidacy for the PTL of Trove for the
Queens cycle. My candidacy has been formally submitted in[1].

I have been the PTL for the Trove project since the Trove release (in
March 2016). During this time, we've seen significant improvements
during the Newton and Ocata releases but faced a setback with the
departure of several companies from the community in the Pike release.

Trove faces many of the same challenges faced by projects that are not
part of the 'core' of OpenStack. Even though the last two user
surveys[2,3] show that Trove is one of the popular projects that
people want to adopt, this has not translated into an increase in
active participation.

The challenges facing Trove in the Queens release are broadly to:

1. improve active participation and contribution in code reviews and
   stabilize the core reviewer team.
2. keep up with changes in the rest of OpenStack
3. stabilize and maintain the existing code base

Two important aspects of my candidacy that are worth highlighting
here.

The first is that I am in favor of taking a serious look at the
current Trove architecture and revisiting whether we should
reimplement the project as a layered platform project that better
leverages underlying infrastructure (IaaS) projects. A good discussion
on the mailing list [4] surfaced a number of ideas which I intend to
discuss in depth at the PTG in Denver with other members of the
team. The hope is that we can come out of the PTG with a clear action
plan, and more importantly a commitment from participants to work on
the project and implement that plan.

The second is that at least in the Queens release, and until we can
get to the point where we have more active participation in the
project, I intend to place the project in 'maintenance-mode'. A change
has been proposed in the governance repository[5] to make this
happen. I expect however that the TC will respect the wishes of
whoever is elected PTL of the project in this election cycle.

I highlight both of these aspects (above) because they are not
universally accepted. I am aware that at least one other person wishes
to also run for election to the position of Trove PTL in the Queens
cycle, and we differ in our views on these two subjects. As I write
this, he has not yet announced his candidacy, and I will likely be
submitting this before he does so I will merely note that we differ on
how to approach the issue of rearchitecting Trove (he would prefer we
continue down the current path and stabilize/enhance it rather than
rearchitect it), and does not favor the notion of attaching the
maintenance-mode tag to the project.

While we differ on these two issues, I intend to remain an active
participant in the project, and support the PTL's lead if I am not
re-elected.

[1] https://review.openstack.org/48962
[2] https://www.openstack.org/assets/survey/April2017SurveyReport.pdf
[3] https://www.openstack.org/assets/survey/October2016SurveyReport.pdf
[4] http://openstack.markmail.org/thread/wokk73ecv44ipfjz
[5] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/488947/