Off hand, I feel like my initial mental response was "Noooo!". Upon thinking of this and talking to Mohammed some, I think it is a necessary evolutionary step. As a burned out PTL who cares, I wonder "who will step up after me" and carry what I perceive as the organizational and co-ordination overhead, standing on stage, and running meetings. Nothing prevents any contributor from running a community meeting, standing on a stage and giving a talk or project update! We are a community, and single points of contact just lead community members to burnout.
Possibly what we are lacking is a "Time for a meeting!" bot.
I am not sure to understand what you are proposing. Wasn't the liaison's system meant for avoiding burnout by delegating tasks, while staying clear on duties? It avoids the back and forth of communication to some maintainer, solving the question "who is handling that?". It still allows delegation. IMO, there was never a limitation of the amount of liaisons for a single "kind" of liaison. You could have 2 ppl working on the releases, 2 on the bugs, etc. Don't get me wrong: on the "drop of the PTL" story, I was more in the "we should drop this" clan. When I discussed it last time with Mohammed (and others, but it was loooooong ago), I didn't focus on the liaisons. But before side-tracking this thread, I would like to understand what are the pain points in the current model (explicitly! examples!), and how moving away from PTLs and liaisons will help the team of maintainers. At first sight, it looks like team duties will be vague. There are various levels of success on self-organizing teams. Regards, JP