Hi,
On 28 May 2024, at 13:56, Valerie Aurora wrote:
following up on my talk today, I’m sending here the BCP draft for
further discussion.
Open-source projects SHOULD publish their contribution and credits
policy and be open about how (and if) people can contribute.
Open-source project maintainers SHOULD adhere to the published policy
and update it when circumstances change.
To create such a policy, maintainers can use a policy guide as a
starting point. Maintainers are advised to be as open and friendly as
they can.
Thank you for the helpful talk and the well-written and concise BCP
draft.
I have a suggestion to change the last sentence based on what we
learned writing this policy, which is that plenty of maintainers have
good reasons to not be open and friendly to new contributions. I think
it would help improve adoption to avoid any suggestions about how to
handle contributions. I suggest something like this instead:
"Maintainers are advised to describe the current reality of how
contributions are handled, rather than how they aspire to handle them,
so as to set expectations for contributors accurately."
Thanks for sending the draft. I/we have been thinking a bit on the
adoption of a BCP around the contribution and credits policy. Looking at
recent history and other discussions, it seems there aren’t a lot of
hard rules about a BCP. However, common themes seem to be that the BCP
is published as a RIPE document and documents a somewhat established
practice, i.e. the “current practice” part.
The proposals you put forward would mean that we write a four sentence
BCP into a RIPE document as the BCP, which then points to a GitHub
repository for more detailed guidance. And that seems a bit thin.
Something that may fit the typical BCP process more is to publish the
actual policy document[1] as the BCP, as that documents the actual
practice. However, this has the downside that a git PR/commit is much
easier than updating a RIPE document in the future. Is that something
the authors would actually want?
This raises some questions for the working group:
1. Do we want to publish this as a BCP?
2. Is it our intention to publish something like the text suggested as a
four sentence BCP?
3. Or is that too thin and would we want to publish the full policy
guide as a BCP?
4. Is that desirable, due to the difficulty of updating a RIPE document
later?
5. Is this a sufficiently established best practice to be appropriate
for a BCP?
Perhaps Miriam, who originally suggested a BCP, would also like to
elaborate on the ideas behind that suggestion :)
We can also revisit the discussion at a later time, if we decide this is
not the right time.
For clarity, this are questions of the best process fit specifically
around a BCP. It is not a criticism of the policy itself - with my
personal hat I think it’s excellent work and am working on adopting
it. From the last meeting it seemed the working group in general is very
positive about it as well.
Sasha
working group co-chair
[1]
https://github.com/contribution-credit/policy/blob/main/policy_guide.md-----
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