Thank you for all these details and links.
On 2025/02/21 02:41:05 Paul King wrote: > Hi folks, > > With my mentor hat on, just a reminder of one of the ASF's basic > principles, meritocracy[1]. Some of you will know this principle well > or will have heard me talk about it. This email is just to close the > loop on some potential loose ends with how the concept works during > incubation and make sure everyone has the same expectations. > > Apologies if some of this is too basic, but there could easily be > folks with different backgrounds, so I'm trying not to make too many > assumptions. For folks familiar with how the ASF works, the *last para > (or three)* is where the incubation side of things is discussed. > > First, how meritocracy normally works. Each ASF project has a tiered > set of permissions, rights and responsibilities. The more > contributions someone makes, the higher they move up those tiers. > > Anyone can contribute to your project by e.g. creating PRs. Folks who > contribute a lot can become committers which gives them direct repo > access rights. Committers who continue to contribute can become PMC > (project management committee) members. PMC members have the right to > vote on releases, vote on new committers and PMC members, and have > extra permissions, e.g. to be able to formally carry out a release on > behalf of the project (and on behalf of the ASF). > > Voting folks into those roles is a way to recognise and reward their > hard work and hopefully encourages them to do more. There is no limit > to the number of folks you can have as committers or PMC members, so > you shouldn't treat membership as a scarce resource. You should always > be looking for potential new candidates for those roles, to grow your > community, bring in new blood and fresh ideas, and for succession > planning. > > It is often easy to identify potential new committers/PMC members for > code contributions, but also be on the lookout for other kinds of > contributions, e.g. answering questions in mailing > lists/slack/stackoverflow, giving conference talks, writing > documentation or blog posts, and so forth. A successful project will > have folks who do all those things. > > Some projects have some predefined guidelines for moving up the tiers, > e.g. you need to do X accepted pull requests, or similar rules. Most > projects just do it from discussions within the team. Some advice that > is often given is don't make your committer bar too high. Obviously, > you don't want folks with direct repo permissions committing code full > of bugs without review. But if you make the "X" too high, potential > committer candidates might lose interest and leave the project and the > opportunity will be lost. It is normally all about setting > expectations. > > The ASF also has the concept of "merit never expires". This means that > once you become a committer/PMC member, you can stay there (if you > want). There is a process for becoming emeritus or even turning off > repo write bits (as a security measure) for folks that become > inactive. > > Votes for releases are normally done on the dev list and PMC member > votes are binding needing at least three +1 votes. So you should aim > to have at least 3 active folks on the PMC, ideally several (or many) > more. There is an expectation that folks on the PMC will join the > "private" mailing list. This is where votes for new committers/PMC > members are done and where security (CVEs and the like) are typically > sent. The "PMC members must be on the private mailing list" rule is > not strictly enforced during incubation. > > Now, tying this back to incubation. During incubation, Grails is > termed a "podling" and the PMC is a podling PMC, a PPMC. Anyone listed > in the original proposal[2] can sign an ICLA[3] and join as a > committer. You could distinguish between committers and PPMC members > at this point but I suggest you just put everyone on the PPMC. Upon > successful graduation, a resolution will go to the board and it will > list out committers and PMC members. > > **You can have a discussion at that point about who has done the heavy > lifting during incubation (or deserves historical merit) and should be > on the PMC.** > > For folks not listed in the original proposal, you should have > discussions and votes on the private list. There are guides for how to > do this[4,5] including email templates to use[6] and some of the > incubator advice[7] is also helpful. Søren and myself can help with > onboarding for now for successful candidates. > > There is a huge amount of info about "The Apache Way" and "incubation" > on the ASF site (not all of it as up-to-date as it could be), so > please shout if you have questions. It is not critical to absorb all > the information right now. > > Cheers, Paul. > [1] https://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works/#meritocracy > [2] https://groovy.apache.org/wiki/grails-proposal.html > [3] https://www.apache.org/licenses/contributor-agreements.html > [4] https://www.apache.org/dev/pmc.html > [5] https://www.apache.org/foundation/governance/pmcs > [6] https://community.apache.org/pmc/adding-committers.html#email-templates > [7] https://incubator.apache.org/cookbook/ >
