One action I took from the last grooming meeting was to investigate
with the community, what process and policies we want to use around the
retirement and/or removal of Committers on the project. As our mentors have
told us before, the community here is empowered to decide the criteria for how
people are voted as committers, and the implication is that the reverse is true
too. However, after discussing this on our call this week, it doesn’t seem
there is any criteria defined; therefore, I wanted to open up the discussion on
this.
To start, The Apache PMC guide says this about removal of
Committers/PMC members:
[http://www.apache.org/dev/pmc.html#pmc-removal
<http://www.apache.org/dev/pmc.html#pmc-removal>]
Projects can establish their own policy on handling inactive members, as long
as it is applied consistently.
It is not a problem to retain members of the PMC who have become inactive, and
it can make it easier for them to stay in touch with the project if they choose
to become active again.
Typically, PMC members who are no longer able to participate will resign from
the PMC. However, if a PMC chooses to remove one of its members (i.e. without
that member's consent), then it must request the Board to make that decision
(which is typically done with a resolution at the Board's next meeting). The
PMC chair should send and email to the board@ mailing list detailing the
request for removal and the justification the PMC has for that removal, and cc:
the project's private@ list.
So with that in mind, it looks like we need to augment the guidelines
Tal started on the wiki
[https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ARIATOSCA/Becoming+a+Committer
<https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ARIATOSCA/Becoming+a+Committer>]
to include removal/retirement/inactive PMC/committers.
To get the ball rolling, I wanted to make some suggestions for (de)selection
criteria that I’ve used in other OSS projects:
Open Daylight uses this process:
https://wiki.opendaylight.org/view/TSC:Main#Committer_Removal_Process
<https://wiki.opendaylight.org/view/TSC:Main#Committer_Removal_Process>
OPNFV uses this:
https://wiki.opnfv.org/display/DEV/Committer+Removal
<https://wiki.opnfv.org/display/DEV/Committer+Removal>
Basically the process everyone basically uses allows a current
committer to elect to step down and there is a simple, straight-forward process
for this.
In other cases its a little more than the obvious: if someone isn’t
contributing to the project for an obviously prolonged time and hasn’t verified
they’re on a leave of absence or something, then they are simply notified with
some notice to respond after which they are removed. All of the examples also
have solutions to more dire situations, but I’ve literally never seen that
happen in any project I’ve worked on in like 6 years.
I’d like to propose a simple copy/paste of the OPNFV rules which seem
to cover what is needed except for obviously changing the mailing list/TSC
contacts. We need to change “TSC” to “AriaTosca PPMC”. There are things to
clean up in there too like references to IRC - Apache requires everything to be
on the dev mailer officially.
—Tom
