During the lsm meeting [1],following various discussion on the cooker list [2] and in order to improve the communication and the organisation of the distribution, a structure to handle the distribution was proposed.

Three level of participation were defined :

- Occasional Contributors / testers
- Maintainers
  - translator
  - packager
  - buildsystem
  - admin
- Managers

Occasional contributor, being occasional, should not really need specific privileges. This is the lowest level of contribution, from a ressource management perspective, not from a utility point of view, of course. 
Everybody with a bugzilla account or subscribed and participating in the cooker process can be counted in this group. 

Mainteners are people more involved with the distribution, with a account or svn commit access. We can dive this group in area of participation :  

translator, everything that has something to do with translation and i18n.

packager, people who create and maintains packages of the distribution

buildsystem, people in charge of the buildsystem infrastructure.

admin, people in charge of the cluster computer and various system administration stuff.

Last level, managers are people who decide on important choices ( technical or non technical ), give direction on the distribution and help to solve various conflicts by discussing.

Managers are grouped in a steering committee. They were named based on their current position inside the company, or based on their contribution. The number of people inside the committee is small in order to avoid endless discussion, but of course, everybody is free to give his opinion on cooker, as before.

Unlike the debian technical committee [3], the goal is not to impose technical decisions, but efficiently discuss the issues, technical or not, with the appropriate people.

This is not really a change in the way the distribution is handled, much more a acknowledgement of the current decision process, based on cooker discussion [2]

The committee can be reached at distrib-sc@mandrivalinux.org, the current composition is :

<insert list with reason etc>



[1] http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/EventRMLL200607
[2] http://archives.mandrivalinux.com/cooker/2006-05/msg00403.php
[3] http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution