by Amin Vahdat, Jennifer Rexford, Nick McKeown.
Dear P4 community:
P4.org membership and P4 adoption are growing swiftly. We have over 65 member organizations in P4.org today and we continue to see notable activity in the developer community. While we strive to keep P4.org as lightweight an organization as possible, our community continues to grow, particularly with the arrival of P4-16. To embrace this growth of P4 and to help keep our work open, properly governed and inclusive of a broad community, we are putting in place a little more structure to the governance. Hopefully, just enough - and no more.
We have therefore decided to create a P4.org Technical Steering Committee (TSC). The TSC will be responsible for making technical decisions about P4, starting immediately. Initially, the TSC will look like this:
- TSC Chair
- Nate Foster (CS Prof @ Cornell, on sabbatical @ Barefoot). Responsible for running all day-to-day technical operations of P4.org and the WGs.
- TSC Members
- The Chairs/Co-chairs of the Working Groups (WGs) below.
- Language WG Co-chairs: Nate Foster + Gordon Brebner (Xilinx)
- Architecture WG Co-chairs: Calin Cascaval (Barefoot) + Dan Daly (Intel)
- API WG Co-chairs: Two Co-chairs (TBD).
- The Chairs/Co-chairs of the Working Groups (WGs) below.
- TSC Members (spelled out for clarity)
- Nate, Calin, Gordon, Dan, plus two TBD from API WG.
To get things going, we have asked Nate and the folks listed above to be the new committee. Then, during 2017, Nate (as TSC Chair) and the Board will develop a more formal/typical voting procedure for members to nominate and vote on TSC members and/or chair. We hope to have a new process in place by Q1 2018. We'll announce more as we go, but we're not expecting anything unusual or complicated.
We'd like to thank Chang Kim - who all of you have gotten to know by now. Chang has steered P4.org for two years and has done a terrific job building the P4.org ecosystem and supporting the P4 language (P4-14 and the new P4-16). Please join us in thanking Chang for his patient service to the community - there have been some tense times while we debate new versions of the language!
We are very lucky that Nate Foster has agreed to take on the TSC Chair position. As many of you know, Nate is a Professor at Cornell University where he runs a research group working on many aspects of Programming Languages, including some groundbreaking work on languages for networking.
We are also glad that Prem Jonnalagadda has kindly agreed to continue his good work in helping with managing the community and outreach for P4.org.
We look forward to seeing many of you at the annual P4 Workshop at Stanford in May.
- Amin, Jen, Nick
(P4.org Board)
