Hey folks, in the Clang area team meeting today (notes), we made the decision to grow the team size to 5 for the 2026 term. This is one of the powers mentioned in the LP0004 project governance proposal:
An area team with less than nine members may increase its size up to nine members with a majority vote. The area team may then appoint members to fill any vacancies as normal.
So, any area team can simply decide to grow at any time, if it feels useful to a majority of the area team leads. The only modification we’re making is that we want this decision to take effect the next term in 2026.
Someone (maybe me) should hammer out the precise dates in 2026, but the generic calendar dates are:
- ATL nominations open the second Monday of January and are open for two weeks
- Elections begin the fourth Monday of January and are open for two weeks
- Election results are announced 48hrs later
- The new term officially begins on the first Monday of March
We considered this at the beginning of this cycle, and decided to keep the team out of a desire to have efficient meetings, but after reflecting on the year, we decided to revise that decision in the new term.
We think the Clang area team would benefit from having more folks to take on action items, read RFCs in detail, do more follow-up, and do more to shepherd RFCs along. There were many talented, qualified candidates last year, and we’d like to rotate new folks onto the area team to have fresh faces, get more folks engaged, diversify the domain expertise on the area team, and empower more people to get stuff done.
One of the ideas that’s come up as we’ve gone on this governance journey is that we want to include diverse community members in these leadership roles. Domain expertise is often helpful for understanding technical disagreements, but a lot of what the area team do draw more from the domains of project management, negotiation, consensus finding, and conflict resolution. I think it’s healthy for us as a project to have a rotating cast of leads, and depth in the roster of former leads, who may not be actively filling the role of ATL today, but understand how this process works. So, consider that my pitch soliciting additional self-nominations for the role of Clang area team lead. 
I will follow up offline with folks who applied last time with some additional encouragement.
cc other area teams for visibility: @llvm-area-team @mlir-area-team @infra-area-team