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ECESIS, PTP

PMC Minutes April 17, 2006

Attending   Late   Regrets Missing
Ward Cunningham Cliff Schmidt John Duimovich
Bjorn Freeman-Benson Wayne Beaton

The Board will vote on the Lepido, Tools for Apache Cocoon archiving.

Wayne is scheduling a conversation with Dwight about the ECESIS project.

The Technology PMC is scheduling a face-to-face on Friday, July 28th (end of OSCON) starting at 2pm.

Cliff reported on his ongoing interaction with the PTP project, his positive meeting with the project lead at EclipseCon, and his most recent and less positive exchange regarding new committers. Cliff read the portion of the email that has caused disturbance.

Regarding the election of Randy Roberts as a PTP committer, the
Technology PMC cannot approve someone as a committer with little or no
history to base a meritocratic decision on. The typical process
through which one becomes a committer at Eclipse begins with the
developer making contributions to the project (usually over the course
of several weeks to months) through patches that are evaluated by the
committers for quality. After a while, some committer (often the one
who has the most contact with the contributor) will nominate the
person referencing the series of contributions that the person has
made and the high quality of those contributions. Based on this
history, the other committers would vote to make the person a
committer. Finally, the PMC then ratifies the vote if this process
has been followed.

I don't see any record of Randy's merit at all. Before the vote, I
hadn't seen a single email from him on the dev list or any post on the
newsgroup. Please correct me if I've missed something, but it looks
from the outside that this guy was only approved because he works with
some of the other committers. This is not an approach that encourages
participation from all parties while maintaining a high level of
quality in the project.

The PMC agreed that this was in fact a reasonable and helpful interpretation of the Technology project charter's requirements for new committers. The location of the charter within the website was discussed (it's here) as was the exact 
wording of the requirement in question:

Developers who give frequent and valuable contributions to a Project, or component of a Project (in the case of large Projects), can have their status promoted to that of a "Committer" for that Project or component respectively.

Whether this charter served the needs of the research community was discussed without resolution. Cliff will solicit PTP participation in further consideration of this question. Cliff will also be clear that revision of the charter, if it is called for, will take considerable advocacy within the Eclipse community, membership and board.

Bjorn noted that he has had similar conversations with other projects that wanted to relax new committer rules, that each felt that they were in some way unique in their needs, and that on further study, each had come to the conclusion that the current rules were workable.

Discussion of OHF postponed due to time constraints.

Current project mentors:

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