In the Contributing Developers category, mainstays Sergey Biryukov, Dominik Schilling (Ocean90), and Cristi Burcă (Scribu) are joined by Aaron Campbell and Helen Hou-Sandi. Aaron has been contributing for several years, but his work this cycle on improvements to custom headers stood out. Helen, who was a Recent Rockstar in 3.3, stepped up with improvements to the theme screen, UI/CSS fixes, and general helpfulness as fixes of all sorts were made through the later stages of the cycle.

The Recent Rockstars section is mainly aimed at recognizing newer contributors and/or contributors who’ve been around for awhile casually but have recently increased their involvement. In this category, Amy Hendrix worked (with Aaron Campbell) on the improvements to custom headers with great success. George Stephanis worked on css and improving the mobile experience. Stas SuÈ™kov contributed to the thinking behind HTML captions, a feature that has been waiting patiently on Trac for years. Max Cutler and Marko Heijnen both worked on updating aspects of XML-RPC, and Kurt Payne contributed to dozens of tickets including the refactoring of admin-ajax.php.

Thank you all for your increased efforts, and congratulations on having your picture in the credits!

In order to create a closer relationship between all the contributor groups, ensure our policies and agendas don’t conflict, recognize outstanding contributors, and just generally level up, we need some organization. To wit:

• I’d like to identify who the active contributors are in each group.
• I’d like to appoint someone from each group (based on votes from the active group participants) as a group liaison to the rest of the WP project and any cross-team initiatives to improve communication.
• I’d like to set up a central P2 for communicating project-wide things so that no contributor group ever has to hear important announcements after the fact and we can discuss any issues that come up that could use the help/attention of people from other groups (including core).
• I’d like to try and set up a monthly IRC chat and/or Google hangout for the liaisons to have some real-time communication.
• I’d like to organize an annual contributor summit. Similar to the core team meetup concept, but more inclusive.

The core code contributor team is the most in the know right now, but I’d like to make things a little more equal. Even within core, sometimes I hear people saying they wish they had more of a voice. The way the survey is set up, first you’ll pick how many reps you think core needs to have in the game (just one for core, or a couple, with each representing a different level of experience/seniority to make sure more issues/concerns are heard?), then you’ll vote on who you think the rep(s) should be. Note that inclusion in the survey does not mean that person has agreed to be a rep… I just pulled from our credits list and teams page for 3.4. Once the votes are in, I’ll contact people to see if they’re up for it.

The survey is at http://wordpressdotorg.polldaddy.com/s/core-contributors
and is password protected to help reduce spam responses: core2012

If you could fill it in before the weekend is over (or right now… it’s only a few multiple choice questions), that would be great.

Thanks!