Dear Everyone, While being one of the OpenStack longtimers, I'm quite new to the governance aspects of the projects and since I was nominated for BoD, I thought that it actually might be a good idea to explain the rationale behind that decision. During the past decade, I have been Instilling the whole concept of open infrastructures with the highest government and corporate levels in Europe, including Telcos, Banks, Research institutes, federation (Such as GAIA-X), and large corporations, I learned while companies have a generally positive outlook when it comes to opensource infrastructures, training, interoperability and especially stability is always a major concern. It's my belief that there is a certain vertical that is missing on many large scale opensource projects, and that is the ability to work with and stay interoperable with enterprise/carrier-grade company requirements. this does not mean that any of our core values in terms of openness should change but in fact, embraced! I also learned that there is always a certain resistance to run open infrastructures on missing-critical systems, this is a matter of training, support, and reliability they don't expect to receive from the ecosystem, and not everyone is as brave as CERN. The following are what I think the focus should be on, and I can certainly help with regardless of election outcome: - Making open infrastructure more appealing to large scale companies, through doubling down on stability and interoperability, LTS, etc. - Establishing a better relationship with large consulting companies (specially big4) in order to create a better understanding of Open Infrastructure. - Focus on large-scale/carrier-grade infrastructures, better training, making a reliable open infrastructure a reality. - Focus on Migrations, there should be projects dedicated to migration from proprietary infrastructure to and from OpenStack, there are third-party tools but I think it's important to have one under the project itself. Thank you all, and best wishes for the new year. :) --- Armin ranjbar