Looks like Asterisk's growth has resulted in the formation of the Asterisk Advisory Council. Somehow when I think of open-source I don't think of a "centralized" council. Isn't the whole point of the open-source model to allow for distributed input by your programming peers? Also, when I think of "Council", I think of the United Nations Security Council or a cabal of men and women plotting for worldwide domination. Didn't Dr. Evil also have a council of advisers - though he killed off a few.

Let's just hope Asterisk and the Asterisk Advisory Council doesn't have any plans on world domination.

Anyway, here's their news...

Digium, the creator of Asterisk and pioneer of open source telephony, today announced the formation of the Asterisk Advisory Council. The Council was developed to respond to the increased interest and participation in the Asterisk open source telephony project.

Composed of five experienced Asterisk community contributors, the Council will assist in the management of the Asterisk open source telephony project. Responsibilities of the council include the selection and supervision of community developers, management of release cycles, and maintenance of Asterisk contributions, among other duties.

"As the Asterisk market continues to grow rapidly on a daily basis, we saw the need to expand the team managing the open source project," said Kevin Fleming, co-maintainer of Asterisk and senior software engineer at Digium. "By identifying these key community members to participate in our council, we can ensure that the project continues to add innovations and improve without any delays."

The following members have been appointed to the council:

     Brian Capouch, Assistant Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Department at Saint Joseph's College: Capouch has integrated Asterisk with a number of other processors including home automation, network monitoring, camera-based security, and the openWRT distribution of Linux. He teaches a college course on VoIP, has presented at a number of industry conferences, and is working on a forthcoming book on Asterisk to be published by Addison-Wesley.

     Olle E. Johansson, Asterisk Developer, consultant and Evangelist, founder of Edvina AB, Sweden: Johansson has contributed to the SIP channel among other parts of Asterisk, worked as a bug marshal and has written documentation on the software and the Asterisk wiki. He is also one of the founders of Astricon - the Asterisk conference, and regularly performs Asterisk training sessions.

     Tilghman Lesher, Developer for VCCH, Inc., a leading provider of innovative solutions based on open source software: Lesher has contributed a large amount of code to the core of Asterisk and is the author of a number of applications and dialplan functions.  He has been programming for over twenty years, with eight years of professional experience.

     Jeremy McNamara, Founder of The NuFone Network, the first Asterisk-based Inter-Asterisk eXchange (IAX) provider: McNamara has been working in all aspects of the telecommunications industry for more than nine years and has extensive experience with the development, testing and deployment of Asterisk-based solutions.

     John Todd, Tello Corporation: Todd comes from an IP networking background, having worked in several large ISPs, ITSPs, and application service providers. He is currently developing next-generation network elements and systems, some of which involve integrating Asterisk with proprietary systems for customers and providers. Todd is also an active participant and speaker at various VoIP forums and conferences.

Details of the Council's organization, membership, management policies, decisions and current projects will be available on www.asterisk.org.