...

1. taking care of all the patch available issues for a given release
2. send an email to the bigtop-dev mailing list reminding the community of the upcoming release and asking them to spend 2-3 days raising the priority of the "must fix" issues for a given release to a "Blocker" status AND making sure that Fix Versions field is set to an upcoming release. Of course, it goes without saying that people have to volunteer to work on this issues – this is not an exercise of assigning work to others. Typically everybody has their own favorite issues that they would like to see fixed in the upcoming release, however do encourage folks to also take a look at the Unscheduled issues since those tend to accumulate lurkers. Also 'git grep' for the 'FIXME/WORKAROUD' prefix in the source code as to identify anything that doesn't need to be worked around anymore
3. after waiting for 2-3 days for community to respond and for the Blockers to settle down – make sure that the resulting list looks reasonable and that there is a general expectation that the release can happen given the state of the source base.
4. create the version tag for the next milestone release: navigate to the https://issues.apache.org/jira/plugins/servlet/project-config/BIGTOP/versions and add the tag there of the form 0.X.Z
5. move all the non-blocker issues assigned to the current release to the next one by navigating to (make sure to replace 0.X.Y with your actual version number): https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/IssueNavigator!executeAdvanced.jspa?jqlQuery=project+%3D+BIGTOP+AND+resolution+%3D+Unresolved+AND+fixVersion+%3D+%220.X.Y%22+and+priority+%21%3D+blocker and then select 'bulk update' from the tools menu (WARNING: MAKE SURE TO UNCHECK the 'Send mail for this update' toggle at the very bottom of the edit screen!!!)

2. Create a Release Series Branch

...