Who Will Lead FAIR Next? Nominations Now Open for TSC Co-Chairs

Nominations are now open for the first official co-chairs of FAIR’s Technical Steering Committee, as the Linux Foundation-backed project moves from provisional leadership to a long-term governance model.

The FAIR Package Manager Project, a decentralized alternative to WordPress.org’s plugin and theme distribution infrastructure, launched in June and is currently led by a 29-member TSC made up of contributors from across the WordPress ecosystem. Since March, Ryan McCue, Mika Epstein, and Carrie Dils have served as provisional co-chairs, a role now open to nominations from the TSC’s organizer group. Nominations close July 28.

In a GitHub post last week, Jory Burson, Vice President of Standards at the Linux Foundation, invited nominations for the three co-chair positions with staggered three-year terms. According to FAIR’s charter, co-chairs may not work for the same company or affiliated entities — a clause designed to maintain independence and avoid consolidation of influence.

“We aren’t just designing a structure in which someone could suddenly take over,” McCue told The Repository in June. “There are formalized structures in place for how decisions are made, and the Linux Foundation provides oversight. That’s important — we’re serious about open governance.”

The Technical Steering Committee is responsible for the overall technical direction of the FAIR project. That includes maintaining the project roadmap, approving new initiatives, managing releases, defining contribution processes, overseeing security practices, creating working groups, and liaising with other open source communities. The TSC also helps shape community norms and may coordinate FAIR-related events and communications.

The co-chairs are elected from within the TSC to help lead this work. They preside over meetings, serve as primary points of contact with the Linux Foundation, and help ensure the smooth operation of the TSC’s responsibilities.

The current co-chairs each bring deep experience in the WordPress ecosystem: McCue created the WordPress REST API and sits on the WordPress Security Team; Epstein led the Plugin Review Team for over a decade; and Dils is a longtime developer, educator, and community advocate.

To ensure continuity and stable leadership, co-chairs will serve staggered terms, with one position rotating each year. This approach, common in open source governance, aims to maintain project stability and consistent leadership as FAIR continues to evolve.

A full list of current TSC members is available on GitHub.

Meanwhile, Joost de Valk and Karim Marucchi, the most public faces of the FAIR project so far, have been busy promoting it. In June, they gave the keynote at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit North America, introducing FAIR to the wider open source world.

Marucchi also appeared on the CMS Critic podcast, where he offered a frank assessment of the state of WordPress: “The idea that one entity can just decide to flip a switch and the code changes is no longer acceptable.”

Image: Kostas Fryganiotis.

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