[Xen-API] Call for nominations for new Hypervisor subproject maintainers and committers

[Lars Kurth <lars.kurth.xen@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Community members,

I wanted to inform you that both Keir Fraser and Tim Deegan, have 
formally stepped down in their roles as committers from the Hypervisor 
team. In addition, you may have seen that Ian Campbell recently 
transferred maintainer-ship for many components to other community 
members (see http://bit.ly/1RnM8JP). This means that Ian will take a much 
less active role within the project in the future. 

First and foremost, the remaining committers and the Xen Project 
Advisory Board would like to thank Keir, Tim and Ian for serving the
Xen Project community and their manyfold and diverse contributions.

Given, that as a project, we have found it difficult to promote 
contributors to maintainer and committer roles in the past, the remaining 
group of committers felt that we should use a more formal appointment 
process to successions and succession planning and have asked me to 
organise this process. Taking a longer term view, the committers also 
felt that we should not restrict the appointment process to replacing
committer positions only, but to consider additional committer positions 
based on merit and to also include new maintainer nominations.
 
Thus, to fill these positions, we are soliciting nominations. To nominate
yourself or someone else within the community, please send e-mail to 
appointments@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx with one of the following subject lines: 
- "Maintainer Nomination of [name]"
- "Committer Nomination of [name]"

Nominees will of course be asked, privately, whether they would be 
willing to serve, if they have been nominated by someone else.

Please provide contact details (at least the full name and e-mail address 
of nominee) in the body of the e-mail and describe why the nominee would 
be a good fit a maintainer and/or committer. The body of the nomination 
should list technical knowledge that is needed to be a maintainer and/or 
committer and highlight core areas of expertise. In addition, we are also 
interested in specific instances, where the nominee showed communication 
and open source leadership qualities. 

For example:
* Was able to help resolve disagreements, both technical and non-
  technical, which you were a party to or observer of.
* Was able to contribute to improve quality and architectural consistency 
  across several components within the Hypervisor
* Has been involved in coordinating the activities of several community 
  members 
* Has led or driven technical initiatives or larger scale feature 
  development within the community 
* Has mentored and encouraged newcomers to the community
* Has represented the project or aspects of it (e.g. via talks, blog 
  posts, ...)
* Has shown other communication and open source leadership qualities

Being a maintainer and/or committer does require a time commitment. 
Nominees should be able to follow e-mail discussions on xen-devel@ on an 
ongoing basis and respond within a couple of days so that discussions 
progress. Committers should ideally be able to spend a minimum of 4-5 
days working on the project per month. For maintainers, the time 
requirement is likely less. 

We anticipate starting our selection process according to the following 
rough time-table. 

Today:    Public call for nominations for new committers and maintainers 
          (self-nominations and 3rd-party nominations both welcome)

March 11: Closing date for nominations

up to
March 30: We email non-self-nominated nominees in private to ask them 
          to confirm whether they are willing to act as nominees. 
          We will also discuss with all nominees, time commitment and 
          other possible questions (from both nominees and existing
          committers), related to the proposed nominations.

March 30: We conduct a formal vote to ratify nominations

April 6:  We publish the new maintainers and committers
          (we may do this earlier)

Note that we have identified some issues in our governance, such as 
whether we need to elect a new project lead or whether we introduce a 
committee to steer the project instead, alongside other issues. We aim 
to resolve these issues *after* new maintainers and committers have been 
elected.

If you do have any questions related to the process, feel free to reply 
to this thread. In addition, if you want to nominate someone else or 
yourself but are not sure, feel free to send your question to 
appointments@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx preceded by "Question:" in the subject line.

Best Regards
Lars Kurth
Xen Project Community Manager
Chairman of Xen Project Advisory Board

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