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Re: [technology-pmc] What do we need to see in a committer nomination?

On 4/17/2009 1:00 PM, Wayne Beaton wrote:
Greetings fellow Technology PMC members

I would like to provide some more specific guidance for committer
nominations in our projects.

I strongly believe in meritocracy; specifically, that prospective
committers need to earn their way into committership. There are many
ways to earn that appointment:

* Provide a significant contribution
* Actively engage in the project through the mailing list,
newsgroups, bugzilla, etc.
* Provide patches of sufficient quality (i.e. that get committed).
* Have the faith of the existing committers.

When it all comes down to it, the last one is the one that really
matters. If the committers vote for a person, it's a pretty good
indicator that they have faith in them.

So... should that be enough?

Our current "policy" is that some evidence needs to be provided. A list
of bug reports that the prospective committer has participated in is
common.

Back when we touched on this topic a couple of months ago (thread titled "Formalizing some practices", Wayne wrote: "I tend to avoid using negatives, but we might consider explicitly stating that it doesn't matter if you've been hired to do the job; you still have to prove to the community that you're worthy of the appointment."

I think this is an important thing to stress. "Joe works for SomeCorp" is specifically NOT relevant for earning committer status.

Here is some phrasing that we could consider for adoption:

"The Technology PMC requires that all committer nominations include SPECIFIC rationalization of the merit of the individual. At a MINIMUM, we expect that all committer nominations include a list of bugs (including ids) that the candidate has contributed patches to, and that those patches have been accepted (committed) by an existing committer. Other acceptable types of rationalization evidence include, but are not limited to: * SPECIFIC project mailing list participation examples (for example, cases where the nominee has made specific architectural, design, or implementation contributions). * Unique enhancement requests entered into Bugzilla that become committed features whether implemented by the nominee or not). * Newsgroup postings that demonstrate a depth of understanding about the project beyond the typical user.

No one of these things is necessary or sufficient; nominees must exhibit a "body of work" to justify committer status. While support from the existing committers is obviously necessary, it is not sufficient by itself."


I think the most important part is to be SPECIFIC, not vague. We should stress that specificity is what we are looking for, IMO.

Any thoughts on this? Too wordy?

Eric


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