Kudos to all involved for creating this repo in the open.
I know there has been (much) more discussion involved in this process which has not been made public. It's quite possible that there are good reasons for this, as has been hinted to me privately, but it's hard to tell. There has been no public recap or summary of the current position, and no clear announcement of the path forward. I think this could be a good place to clear up some essential issues related to the future of node instead of bikeshedding about microlevel policies like versioning schemes.
Now, I care a lot about the node community. It's currently the principle source of my livelihood and I count a good number of people that I've met from various conferences, meetups, and community events as close friends. I think it would be helpful to have more public insight on a path forward.
Technical Committee As I understand it, community-owned node (under whatever name) would be led by a Technical Committee to oversee development and day-to-day operations of the code base and architecture. Could someone articulate the makeup, decision making process, and governance of this body?
Scope Will the scope or spirit of the project change? Historically, node code has been a fairly small surface area, with most development pushed out into userland (npmland) modules. I have seen discussion here about bringing some popular modules into the node-forward namespace. Does this indicate an increased scope?
Community Contributions In addition to the core Technical Committee members, what other roles will exist? Specifically, how will the project do outreach to new users and new contributors, and to what extent? This is something that some other major open source projects do a good job of, and that node could improve on. Recognizing that everyone can contribute in some way and creating opportunities for more casual contribution -- including in non-code related ways, such as documentation -- shows that a project respects its community and aspires to be inclusive and accessible.
Timeline Finally, I think what's on everyone's minds is the question of when. For lack of other knowledge or communication, there is very little to go on but rumors and speculation. Joyent's node hasn't had a major release in a year and a half and has no definitive timeline (or realistic estimate) for node 0.12.
I'm assuming that everyone is operating with the best intentions and wants what is best for node and for the community of developers, contributors, and users. I want this too. A good start would be reducing uncertainty through frank, clear, public communication.