Welcome Jörg as the first Thunderbird staff!

[R Kent James]

Today we managed to finalize the hiring of Jörg Knobloch as the first
Thunderbird staff in our new "community driven" era. Jörg is contracted
to spend half-time with Thunderbird, beginning retroactively on November
13 2016, with the following responsibilities:

1. Maintain comm-central and related repositories to keep Thunderbird
buildable.
2. Manage code for aurora, beta, and esr releases of Thunderbird.
3. Investigate and solve reported regressions and security issues with
Thunderbird.
4. Review patches to Thunderbird submitted by others.
5. Time permitting, implement additional bug fixes, refactoring, or
features in Thunderbird.

As we have discussed here already, just keeping Thunderbird buildable
and usable while following Gecko is an enormous task that will keep Jörg
very busy in his limited available time, so please do not expect wonders
here.

This is also not the beginning of a switch from volunteer-driven to
staff-driven, but it hopefully is the beginning of an era where we can
stop expecting completely unreasonable levels of commitments from key
volunteers. As for myself, I am committed to continuing in a volunteer
role for the foreseeable future, and am looking forward to staff doing
some key roles such as Jörg is taking on, so that we volunteers can work
on the aspects of Thunderbird that we really want to be working on.

Welcome (and thank you for all of your hard work) Jörg!

R. Kent James
Treasurer, Thunderbird Council