Hi Sharan, Thank you for the feedback. Couple points that immediately struck me was the use of the word 'committer'. This term is closely associated with code contributions and therefore causes confusion. I understand that ASF defines it differently but it is unfortunately overloaded. Perhaps the ASF can consider using a different term that is not strongly associated with code contributions?
I am very supportive of recognizing non-code contributions. They are valuable for the community and need to be appropriately recognized by the project. Over the years, one of the repeated concerns I have heard is that a non-coding committer may make changes to the code causing issues. I find this concern silly. As you described with your experience, people with commit bits are aware of their role and responsibilities. They will rarely commit code in an area that they don't understand. In the worst case we can always revert it ;) Dinesh > On Feb 5, 2022, at 7:37 AM, sharanf <sha...@apache.org> wrote: > > Hi All > I mentioned a while ago that I would start a discussion about having > Committers on the project that can focus on non coding contributions. > Let me start by saying that I wouldn't be doing what I do at the ASF today if > the first project I contributed to (Apache OFBiz) had not recognised my non > coding contributions and made me a committer. My contributions to the project > were mainly testing and documentation. One year when ApacheCon EU came around > I helped organise an ApacheCon track for the project. > I must admit that I went through quite a few emotions when I received the > committership email.. first surprise, excitement but also a little > apprehension, because being a committer carries some responsibility. I really > didn't want to mess up a project that I cared so much about. What really made > the difference for me was that the email highlighted that the PMC trusted me. > They trusted me with the codebase - or more importantly they trusted that I > would use my judgement about whether or not to do any code changes. And > initially it wasn't an issue - I didnt need to update the codebase so I even > though I was a committer, I didn't commit anything. Why should I? I continued > making sure that the blogs, documentation and social media promotion all kept > happening - which really helped the project. > A little later on we started incorporating documentation into the codebase as > asciidoc files so that was when being able to commit changes to the repo > became a bit more important. So yes I do commit changes every now and then - > but only in the scope of the work I am doing. I went on to become their first > ever non coding PMC member too :-). And I can say that being a non coder > brings another perspective. > So here in Apache Cassandra I see there is a whole lot of activity happening > around the website, marketing, project promotion, blogs, social media - these > activities are all contributions to the project. If there are contributions > happening in the project that need a committer to action, then it could make > sense to consider having committers that are focussed around the 'non coding' > parts. > I would say that any contribution that helps a project in a positive way is > valid contribution so recognising the people that do that work by making them > Committers helps not only with motivation but also shows that you value those > skills as well as coding. > We want both coding and non coding contributions to earn the same merit so I > see it is more about trusting people to do the right thing for the project. > This is written from my own experience so I'm happy to get any feedback, > comments and other viewpoints! > Thanks > Sharan
