org: Check in with inactive maintainers (2024)

[craigbox]

Every year we ask our inactive maintainers to transition to Emeritus.

If a maintainer becomes inactive in the project for over a year, the individual will be asked to transition to an emeritus maintainer. Emeritus maintainers lose their ability to approve code contributions, but retain their voting rights for up to one year. After one year, emeritus maintainers revert back to being normal members with no voting rights.

This has a few motivations:

• Thank and honor all the past maintainers for all the invaluable work they have done over the years
• Trim the list of maintainers to (1) improve discover-ability of who is able to actively maintainer/review/etc an area and (2) reduce the number of privileged users in the org

#1530 contains the list of inactive maintainers for the year. This issue relates to users we have identified as having very low activity, or where we know people have transitioned off working on Istio.

If you would like to step down as a maintainer at this stage, please comment on this issue to let us know. The goal here is very much not to "kick people out" of the maintainers list.

Given it's close to the holiday period I will keep this open until mid-January or until I've heard from everyone on the list. However, one note: you do not need to hold a formal title of "maintainer" to be a valuable contributor to the project, and if you do step down the process to step back into the role when you have more time to commit to Istio is fairly quick and easy.

Inactive maintainers:

@nmittler
@GregHanson
@nrjpoddar
@Monkeyanator
@rcernich
@frankbu
@rvennam
@aryan16
@johnma14
@zhlsunshine