Every Node developer is familiar with the Node.js Foundation, but not everybody know how it works and what are its actual activities. We’re going to shed some light on these issues.
The Foundation is on a mission to enable the adoption of Node.js on a large scale and accelerate its development. As the name entails, it doesn’t have any commercial implication, it’s not a company that markets or sales a product, it’s a foundation with an open governance model, driven by the community. The Node.js Foundation is the steward of Node.js, helping it grow and evolve on a long term basis.
You can get in depth information about the Governance, By-Laws, Trademark Guidelines and other in the Foundation section of their website.
So, who’s in charge?
The Foundation is governed by a Board of Directors composed of representatives from the corporate members. There are three tiers of corporate members, platinum, gold and silver. Each tier has a presence in the board, as follows: every platinum member gets one seat on the board, for every 3 gold members there is an election to choose a representative and for every 10 silver members the same thing happens again. If you check out the membership right now you’ll see a lot of big names there, companies that adopted Node early on and are heavily based on it. Besides the corporate members there is also on the board a representative of the Technical Steering Committee and one elected by the individual membership class.
This brings us to the individual membership issues. You can also be a part of the Node.js Foundation. The membership costs 100 $ per year, or 25 $ for students. If you are an active contributor to the Node.js projectsor in any of its sub-projects you are eligible for free membership.
The board at this time is composed of:
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Chairperson: Danese Cooper, distinguished member of technical staff – open source at PayPal.
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Vice-Chairperson: Scott Hammond, chief executive officer at Joyent.
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TSC Director: Rod Vagg, chief node officer at NodeSource.
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Gold-level Director: Charlie Robbins, director of engineering at GoDaddy.com.
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Silver-level Director: Brian McCallister, chief technology officer of platforms at Groupon.
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Director: Todd Moore, vice president of open technology at IBM.
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Director: Colleen Evans, principal program manager at Microsoft.
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Director: Rich Sharples, senior director of product management at Red Hat.
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Director: Imad Sousou, vice president and general manager at Intel.
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Director: Ashley Williams, individual membership director.
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Director: Feross Aboukhadijeh, individual membership director.
By checking out the Node.js board you can get a good glimpse of what companies are actively involved in node.js (a great piece of information if you’re job hunting)
Besides the Board, there is also a Technical Steering Committee that has a representative on the board. The TSC sets the technical direction of Node and handles everything related to the technical development (releases, standards, repo hosting etc)
The Node.js Foundation may seem to some like some sort of mysterious entity, but actually it’s made from the ground up from node people. No matter the company, no matter the brand, there are all developers interested in node.js, caring and growing it. Just think of it as a parent taking care of a child (the child being Node), only it’s not just one parent, there’s dozens, hundreds and more. Anybody can be a contributor to the node.js project, individuals can be nominated as collaborators by TSC members and if the nomination is approved, that person gets the actual invitation to become a node.js contributor. You can dive in the contributing process here if you’re interested to find out more.
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