On Fri, Aug 04, 2017 at 12:27:16PM +0100, Chiyuan Zhang wrote: > Suppose we lower the standard or completely remove the formal standard for > committers, then we could probably be able to get more committers from the > first type. But that might not necessarily be good to us
Can you elaborate your reasoning here? (I'm not implying that I agree or disagree with you, I just want to understand where this fear is coming from.) > having people that could either contribute relatively important components > or provide longer term commitment to the project. But on the other hand, > having a standard for committers do not (I hope) discourage the first type > of contributors to contribute PRs. Let me tell you a little campfire story: Back in the old days of Mahout we implicitly had a relatively high bar for becoming a committer. People thought that in order to become committer they would have to contribute substantial patches, often full new algorithm implementations. What the project really needed were a lot of work polishing, optimising, cleaning, making easier to use, documenting etc. Due to the perception of requiring substantial contributions to get the reward of becoming committer however we never received much of the latter. Lesson learnt for me: The way you setup your reward systems greatly influences which kind of help your project will receive. Isabel -- Sorry for any typos: Mail was typed in vim, written in mutt, via ssh (most likely involving some kind of mobile connection only.)
