Erwin,
Although it may sound contradictory, this isn't about Jonah's merit or
qualifications. It's about the demonstration of merit. The policy
details and reasoning are described at
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Technology#Committer_Elections
Eclipse is truly open, in all ways. One of the consequences of that is
transparency and fairness in how committer status is awarded. It must be
based on merit, and that merit must be clearly demonstrated in a way
that anyone can potentially satisfy. It doesn't matter who someone works
for or what degrees they have or where they come from - none of that or
a whole lot of other things that might be considered "good" about a
person.
We are not questioning this nominee's qualifications; he just needs to
follow the same process that all other committers to all other projects
have followed. From the sounds of it, in practicality this just means a
matter of short time while he makes some contributions that can be cited
in a nomination.
By the way, all of this should not have been a surprise; the process has
failed you in that it did not make this abundantly clear when you were
assigned project leadership role. That's not to blame you in any way;
the process failed and you are not the first new project leader to
expose that. Most of this discussion has been about what we, as the PMC
and project mentors, need to do to make sure every project lead knows,
understands, and buys into these concepts and policies.
Hope this helps explain,
Eric
PMC members,
For what it's worth, Jonah is well-known in the science group and
by me, and his contributions are many and much appreciated.
He has just not yet contributed to Triquetrum as we're a young
project, and he was not added upfront as a committer in the
proposal (which would have passed without these reactions).
At today's unconference in Toulouse, Jonah has kindly offered to
migrate previous work into Triquetrum, on a specific way to
integrate between Java & external Python processes.
This is a thing of great value for scientific workflows.
He and Matt were the core developers on the previous
implementation (Matt knows Jonah well, just made a sarcastic joke
which was well understood by our group).
So it only seemed correct for me that this would be formalized by
having Jonah as committer for his work.
If this is not sufficient as merit (i.e. only historical merit
tracked in eclipse tools is acceptable for some reason), we'll
take the overhead of handling this in another way.
I would hope that the resulting contributions can then count as
proof-of-merit to give Jonah a-posteriori the committer status to
help maintaining this and to be able to add further value and
skills to our team and the project.
regards
erwin
Op 10/06/2016 om 21:02 schreef Jay Jay Billings:
Is there project
lead training or education materials?
I read some wiki articles, attended committer bootcamp at
ECNA14, messed up my first committer nomination, and now email you guys,
my mentor or Wayne if I have questions.
So that's a smart way of saying we probably need to be
talking about a lack of training as the root cause.
Jay
That bug, and the ones
that it links to, are good but I think we also need to address a more
fundamental root cause. It should not surprise a project lead that he
needs to provide evidence of merit; it should be part of what he is
educated about in the process of becoming a committer and project lead.
I'll be honest: it absolutely shocks me that we have people in the
position of project leadership who do not fundamentally understand this.
*That* is what I consider more important than making the system prompt
and/or enforce; if we solve the root problem, those other things are
just convenient reminders.
Like many problems in software development, it seems like it's really a
communication problem.
Eric
Guys,
I totally agree. Unfortunately Erwin didn't reach out to
the other committers before nominating Jonah, so I didn't get to tell
him about the meritocratic requirement. This wouldn't be a problem if it
was on the form, I think.
Jay
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