Any maintainer who is unresponsive or non-participatory (across the various forms of communication used by the project) for a period of two months forfeits maintainer privileges and resumes a contributor role.
While much communication is asynchronous, maintainers are required to attend a minimum of one meeting a month in order facilitate high-fidelity, synchronous communication, which is necessary for the quality collaboration, conveyance of complex topics, and real-time advancement of the project.
A core team of maintainers steward SMP, however, Service Mesh Performance is comprised of any number of components (adapters, load generators, ...) and any number of logical areas of concern (e.g. community, governance, ...). The size of SMP's project vision and the pace of its development, requires sub-teams to supplement the core team. Each sub-team is focused on a specific area/component e.g., adapters, docs, website, UI, CLI, and so on. To ensure global coordination and a strong, coherent vision for the project as a whole, each sub-team is led by a member of the core team.