I have been thinking about what makes good committer process lately and wanted to share my thoughts and gather feedback from others.
Please comment! Over the last 6 months or so, the way that Apache Beam recruits and encourages a wide range of committers has been highlighted and widely admired in various parts of Apache. There are a couple of aspects of how this goes in Beam that merit some interesting discussion and I think that adopting some of these ideas in Drill could be really useful. First off, there is some really nice documentation about the contributions that can lead to committer status. See here: https://beam.apache.org/contribute/become-a-committer/ Secondly, there is a very interesting process in which early contributors are encouraged to progress in the project and to stick around. This takes the form of an encouraging email on the event of very early contributions, as well as another dialog that is started once a contributor starts making repeated contributions. The first encouragement just makes sense, but the second dialog is much more subtle. What happens is that the newly productive contributor is told about the committer process (and what committership means) and is told that their first few contributions have been noticed and are being watched by the PMC with interest. They are pointed at the committer guide so that they can see if there are other kinds of contributions that they could make that would be of real interest to the project. One (or more) of the PMC are appointed to serve as a mentor for each such potential committer. The role of the mentor is to answer questions about Apache and to encourage the potential committer. One dangerous tendency in this encouragement is that it can be interpreted as a strict bar to be passed or that it is like an exam of some kind. Such a committer test is widely frowned on in the Apache Foundation, but good encouragement is widely considered very good. This is a thin line. One lesson that Beam has learned well and which is not a new concept at all is that it is very important to recognize a few facts: - giving somebody committer status has nearly no risk for the project - giving somebody committer status, especially if it is their first Apache project is a HUGE emotional boost that helps bind people to the project - having too many inactive committers has almost no effect on a project This means that it is usually better to lower the bar for nominating a committer rather than raise it. There is little risk and lots of potential benefit.
