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Re: [technology-pmc] Vote for Committer status for Jonah Graham was started by Erwin De Ley

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
June 10, 2016 3:25 PM
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:


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June 10, 2016 3:02 PM

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

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June 10, 2016 1:48 PM
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

June 10, 2016 1:26 PM

Guys,

I think this is the bug:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=460734

Jay

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June 10, 2016 12:50 PM

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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