Hi Carlos, Thanks for asking this. This is a very good question. Let me put down my personal perspective.
For Apache Texera, we do not have a fixed checklist or a formal numerical threshold for becoming a committer. This, I believe, is a common practice in many projects from Apache or other foundations. Committership is usually based on merit, trust, and sustained contribution, and the decision is made by the project community through discussion and vote. In Apache's setting, PMC members vote for committership. In practice, when existing PMC members believe that a contributor has demonstrated meaningful and consistent contributions in the project, the PMC may discuss the candidate and make a decision through a vote. Contributions can come in many forms, including code, tests, documentation, infra construction, issue triage, PR reviews, design discussions, release validation, and helping other contributors. One thing I want to emphasize is that, human efforts are more important in the current agent era. With modern AI tools, producing code is noticeably becoming cheaper and faster. As a result, in 2026, the more valuable part falls on the human efforts: understanding what should be built, discussing tradeoffs, reviewing changes carefully, maintaining project quality, and supporting the community. Committership is therefore not just a recognition of past contributions, but also a responsibility. A committer is trusted to help maintain the project, make sound technical decisions, respect the project’s processes, and act in the long-term interest of the community. This is a serious responsibility, and not every contributor is willing or ready to take it on. Speaking from my own experience, I have a full-time job, but I still contribute, in a part time capacity, to Texera. This is indeed because I am a Texera committer, and PPMC, and I do care about the project and the community. At the same time, I have also been trying to earn trust in the Apache Spark community to become a Spark committer, where there had been more than 2,200 contributors over time, but only around 100 committers so far. I contribute mainly to the PySpark component, there are still a lot of areas for me to learn before I can be granted with the committer responsibility to make meaningful decisions for spark. Finally, from the bottom of my heart, I would like to encourage anyone interested in becoming a Texera committer to keep participating actively in the project. For instance, we are currently working hard towards our first Apache release, v1.1.0-incubating. This is a great opportunity for contributors to get involved in concrete and meaningful ways! Texera has been incubating for Apache projects for more than 1 year now, and we really need all of your help to get Texera graduated from the incubation, so that we can finally declare that Texera is an "Apache" project. Before that, those fancy names (committer, PPMC, etc.) still meant nothing yet. As a Texera PPMC member, I want to assure you that we will recognize contributors’ efforts. We recently welcomed Meng and Xuan as new committers, and we are always happy to see more contributors grow into larger roles in the project! Cheers, and sincerely, Yicong Huang <https://yicong-huang.github.io> [email protected] On May 12, 2026 at 5:21 PM -0700, Carlos Ernesto Alvarez Berumen < [email protected]>, wrote: Hi Texera community, I hope you are doing well. I wanted to ask about the criteria for becoming a committer on Apache Texera. I am not sure whether open source projects generally have a formal process for this, or whether Apache projects in particular usually define one. Is there already a documented set of criteria or expectations for becoming a committer on Texera? If not, is there an expected timeline for establishing one, or a reason why the project does not currently have one? Thanks Best regards, Yicong Huang
