[DISCUSS] Non Coding Committers

[sharanf]

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