Hi, Looking at How it Works, I think it needs an update to reflect current thinking on community.
1. https://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html#developers I believe there is consensus that contributors are not only developers with their hands on the code, but: people who ask and answer questions on the user and dev lists; people who find bugs and report them, with or without writing test cases; people who document the projects, including web and "hard copy" documents; people who help organize meetups, both in real life and online. So perhaps we could add a section on "contributors" that covers the other categories of non-developer contributors? 2. I believe that we should ask contributors for an ICLA long before they are invited to become committers. Once a contributor has made several non-trivial contributions to a project, I believe that the project should ask them to file an ICLA if they have not already done so. This will have these potential benefits: It will be much easier to make them committers; all it will take is for the PMC to hold a successful vote and as soon as they are invited and accept, the PMC can simply request their account. It will give the PMC incentive to communicate with their contributors about the value the contributors bring to the projects. Our increasing use of GitHub for development makes this a straightforward exercise. Each PMC will have their own criteria for asking for an ICLA, which doubtless will be less stringent than committership. It will clarify the intellectual property issues (provenance) associated with the contributions. Some projects have a very high bar for committership and all of the contributions prior to formal offers of committership are assumed to be given under the terms of the Apache License, but we have no formal understanding of this. Craig Craig L Russell c...@apache.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@community.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@community.apache.org
