Project role announcements

[Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org>]

It gives me great pleasure to be able to announce that we have filled
the two recently advertised positions.

I'd like to welcome Paul Barker as our Ecosystem Engineering and
Operations Lead. Paul has been around both the Yocto Project and
OpenEmbedded for a long time and is a name many will recognise. You
will start to see Paul helping out with the day to day running in
various areas of the project, giving the project some redundancy and
enabling me to take a break too.

I'd also like to announce Yoann Congal with backup from others at Smile
as our new LTS maintainer as Steve Sakoman takes a well deserved
retirement. Yoann/Smile have been doing great work on meta-openembedded
with our various metrics and tracking tools as well as being active in
various project meetings including bug fixing so many of you know him
already. There will be an transition period as we transfer the role.

I want to take the opportunity to say a huge thanks to Steve Sakoman
for looking after multiple LTS releases in a careful, considered and
smooth way. I no longer had to worry about them, I could just trust
everything was being handled which is probably the best way I can
illustrate the job Steve has been doing. So a huge thanks to Steve, I
(and the project) really do appreciate what you've achieved there and
you set a high standard to follow!

I also want to thank all who applied for these roles, there were many
good candidates and the final decision was a tough one so thanks to
everyone who applied.

Cheers,

Richard