SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Oct 23, 2014) - Joyent, Inc., the corporate steward of the Node.js open source project, today announced a proposal for the creation of a Node.js Advisory Board, which serves as a significant first step toward a fully open governance model. Initial advisory board members represent a wide swath of the Node.js community including Node.js core contributors, community members and Node.js vendors, including representatives from IBM, Netflix, npm, nearForm, NodeSource, PayPal, StrongLoop, Walmart, Yahoo, and others. The board will provide input and guidance to Node.js project leadership about the roadmap, policies and procedures, governance of the core team, criteria for compliant products, and operating governance structure.

Node.js is the language of choice for high-performance, low latency applications, powering everything from robots to API engines to cloud stacks and mobile websites. Over the last two years, more and more large enterprises have adopted Node.js as part of their enterprise fabric. Today, Node.js is used by tens of thousands of organizations in over 200 countries and amasses over 2 million downloads a month.

"With such rapid adoption over the last few years, the community surrounding Node.js has become increasingly rich and complex -- and it will only continue to grow," said Scott Hammond, CEO of Joyent. "It's crucial we find ways to balance the needs of all constituents and users of Node.js and provide a platform for these diverse organizations to collaborate and provide input to project leadership. In order to create a truly trusted playing field, we need to engage the energized community of contributors and maintainers around Node.js."

The full Node.js Advisory Board draft proposal is available for feedback, comments and membership nominations at http://nodejs.org/about/advisory-board. In order to achieve balanced membership, board seats will be allocated to those investing time and effort to contribute to the project, users deploying Node.js, companies incorporating Node.js into their products, and outside expertise from other open source projects. Membership requires no sponsorship or fee. The selection process and output from board meetings will be made publicly available and seats will be allocated as follows:

• Two individual seats for top core technical maintainers (excluding employees at Joyent or companies holding a corporate seat)
• Up to eight additional seats: four corporate and four users
• One curator seat
• One OSS seat
• Node.js core technical project lead TJ Fontaine

The selection process will be open, transparent, and guided by objective criteria detailed in the full proposal. Numerous members of the Node.js community helped in the development of this proposal and the formation of a temporary list of board members, available at http://nodejs.org/about/advisory-board/members. The community-elected members will be finalized over the next few months.

"The establishment of an advisory board and open governance will foster community transparency and greater innovation," said Angel Diaz, Vice President, IBM Open Technology and Cloud Performance. "IBM is excited the community has decided to take this first step to building an open structure for all contributors and consumers of Node.js."

"Over the past half a decade, I've watched the community around Node.js proliferate into an incredibly rich, active ecosystem of contributors," said Bill Scott, VP Business Engineering, Product Development at PayPal. "We've all worked in tandem to achieve what Node.js has become today and we couldn't be more excited to witness this next chapter of truly open governance. Openness is what Node.js is built on and the formation of the advisory board cements the importance of transparency and synergy."

"We know firsthand why Node.js is a popular choice for thousands of organizations worldwide," said Gianugo Rabellino, senior director of open source communities at Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. "Forming a board of such passionate contributors and users to advise Node.js leadership as its growth continues validates the project's maturity and sets an open stage for more success to come."

About Joyent

Joyent is the high-performance infrastructure company. The Joyent Cloud is built from the ground up to meet the requirements of today's demanding real-time web and mobile applications. Joyent is the steward of Node.js, the open source server-side JavaScript project that provides developers and enterprises with the most powerful runtime for developing data-intensive, real-time apps. For more information visit http://www.joyent.com/.