Hyperledger Blockchain Project to Elect New Tech Committee

Election season has begun for the Hyperledger project, the open-source, Linux Foundation-led blockchain initiative.

The project is preparing to elect a new technical steering committee (TSC) as well as a new chairperson for that committee this month. The transition comes less than a year after the Hyperledger project publicly launched in December 2015 as a way to create a "business blockchain" for use by enterprises.

The nomination process for the committee began yesterday, and runs through 18th August. Voting among the project's active contributor base – those participating in the development of the Hyperledger codebase – begins that day, and runs through 24th August.

To facilitate the vote, the project is turning to a platform called the Condorcet Internet Voting Service (CIVS). Developed by Cornell, it allows participating voters to create a slate of their preferred candidates.

The results will be announced on the 25th.

Once the committee is selected, those new members will vote between themselves on the a new chairperson, Hyperledger executive director Brian Behlendorf said.

The committee membership is currently composed of some of the project's biggest backers, including IBM, DTCC, Intel and JPMorgan. The TSC, in turn, is currently chaired by Christopher Ferris of IBM.

According to Behlendorf, the hope is to staff the TSC with those who contribute the most to the initiative.

He told CoinDesk:

"We bootstrapped the TSC with kind of the initial premier members of the organization, but we didn’t want that to hard-code in. We really wanted to instill, across the project, a 'do-ocracy', which is a term we brought over from Apache."

Since launch, the Hyperledger Project has explored a range of blockchain use cases, with a number of notable companies involved submitting proposals for their own approach to the technology.

To date, more than 40 companies are taking part in the project.

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