Greetings Committers.
Given that many of you are celebrating a holiday on May 9, I've decided to postpone the May Committer Office Hours session by one week.
So... our next Committer Office Hours will be on:
May 9 2024 at 13.30 UTC.
While I have your attention... I've spoken with a number of PMCs who have expressed concern regarding nomination statements for committer elections. They are especially concerned that the contribution records of some recent nominees have been sparse.
Like everything else we do, our process for bringing new committers onto a project is open, transparent, and meritocratic. Once a project is up and running, committers always start as contributors. Committer elections provide an opportunity to highlight the contribution record of a candidate and demonstrate to the community that the project is following the open source practices that we value. Committer elections require a nomination statement that provides this demonstration.
What constitutes significant contribution is difficult to quantify. The level of commitment of a candidate to the goals of the project is difficult to quantify. A contributor's understanding of the Eclipse Foundation Development Process and Intellectual Property Due Diligence process is difficult to quantify.
For all of the above reasons, we depend heavily on committers to make a judgement call regarding the contribution record and behaviour of committer candidates, and summarise that judgement in a manner that can be consumed as easily as possible. We're not looking for a dissertation. Rather, we need a few pointers to actual significant contributions that demonstrate that the candidate is ready to take on committer responsibilities (as we've discussed before, contributions do not necessarily need to be code contributions).
The EMO depends heavily on PMCs to validate that committer elections are operated according to our principles and in good faith. To that end, providing very specific pointers to very specific contributions that demonstrate merit are very helpful, and improve the odds of getting the PMC's approval in a timely manner.
You may find yourself asking, are they really serious about this? Yes. Yes, we are serious.
There is, of course, more information in the
handbook.
Thanks for your attention.
See you next week.
Wayne
-- Wayne Beaton
Director of Open Source Projects | Eclipse Foundation
My working day may not be your working day! Please don’t feel obliged to read or reply to this e-mail outside of your normal working hours.
