The technical steering committee (TSC) at Hyperledger has now elected another IBM officer for its chair, during ongoing controversy about the tech giant’s increased representation on the panel.

A senior technical staff member at IBM for web open technologies and blockchain, Arnaud Le Hors, has replaced Dan Middleton, a principal engineer with Intel, as per an email sent to the TSC mailing list on Wednesday. 

“I’m happy to have the chair role in good hands,” Middelton wrote to the list.

Last year, Middleton had succeeded Christopher Ferris, the CTO of a web open technology at IBM, who had been chaired at TSC since 2016.

During 2018, the TSC had released the Civility, Diversity, and Inclusion working groups, which primarily focuses in diversity through a broad perspective, but more so on the demographics rather than corporate diversity. 

During the same period, the alliance has witnessed more partnerships between projects, such as Hyperledger Ursa, a product worked on by the creators of Hyperledger’s Indy. Fabric and Sawtooth projects. 

Middleton also stated in the email that when it is about influencing Hyperledger, the code is crucial.

“The real influence in an open source community like this is contributions,” Middelton noted. “I sort of wish that all the effort that went into discussions on the election and all the effort that will go into coming up with complex election rules just went to actual technical development.”

Both IBM and Hyperledger are yet to comment on this news.

The Hyperledger TSC created working groups to focus on approving projects, technical issues and reviewing updates.

Earlier last week, the code contributors at Hyperledger elected the TSC for 2019-2020, and the number of employees from IBM on the committee doubled, leaving 6 of the 11 seats for Big Blue. This arose concerns that the firm has an outsized influence over Hyperledger.

In response to this controversy, Brian Behlendorf, the executive director, explained that the TSC had discussed on expanding the size of the committee with the governing board or for “one time add of a set of new TSC members, so that this greater representation can happen in the current TSC team.”

Those suggestions were apparently already being considered by the recent chair. Earlier on Thursday, Le Hors had posted a proposal on the agenda page of Hyperledger TSC page for the 4 consecutive candidates in line from the previous election to join the existing term.

“All those will be topics taken up by the TSC in what appears to be pretty short order,” Behlendorf stated in an email.

Le Hors had worked at IBM for almost 20 years now, and has been involved with Hyperledger since it was released, as stated in his bio.