For the past 5 years Backdrop has been growing. It's been a slow but steady increase in adoption, contributors, and those involved in core development. It's time we added some new faces to our leadership team. On behalf of the Backdrop Project Management Committee, I'm happy to announce that we have added a new core committer, and 3 new people on the PMC.
New PMC Members
These three people have exhibited ongoing support and enthusiasm for the Backdrop project, and have volunteered countless hours both working to improve the software and to grow the community. The current Project Management Committee voted unanimously to add the following people to the team.
Andy Shillingford, nominated by Jen Lampton
Andy has been one of our most active core contributors since the very beginning of Backdrop. He's a great coder, but also has great vision. He's smart and practical at the same time, and often serves as a voice of reason. I would love to have him on the PMC to help us with the hard decisions.
Olaf Grabienski, nominated by Gregory Netsas
Olaf has been an active member of the community for a long time now; He has been attending dev meetings very often, and he is very passionate and active with our efforts to provide a better multilingual product. Although this is an area that many of us (including myself) are very interested in and would like to see Backdrop do more about, I think that he is the one person that has worked on it the most. [...] It would be great to have him as a multilingual constituent in the PMC.
Tim Erickson, nominated by Gregory Netsas
Tim has been: contributing documentation, doing reviews/testing for core PRs, being an advocate for new core features, keeping an eye in the forum for questions by newcomers, and either responding himself or bringing them to our attention, evangelizing Backdrop, and thinking of ways to spread the word about it [...], and organizing code/contribution sprints and Virtual User Group meetings. I can hardly think of any weekly outreach/design or dev meeting he's missed, and I have the general impression that he is very passionate about Backdrop as a product and as a community.
Our newest core committer
Peter Anderson or BWPanda, as many of you know him, has been on our radar as a potential core committer since the beginning of Backdrop itself. The quality of his work was noticed by existing core committers back then, and he was on our initial short-list of candidates. This year, timing was better for both Backdrop and for Peter, and we're thrilled to have him on the leadership team. He's already jumped right in and is helping us get more done. Thank you Peter!