Re: Git Project Leadership Committee
On Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 06:41:38PM -0400, Jeff King wrote: > - we should avoid anyone who is affiliated with a company that already >has a member on the committee. So nobody from Google and nobody from >GitHub. I would extend that to Microsoft, too, given a certain >impending acquisition. I'd expect anybody who is affiliated with a >company to recuse themselves from decisions that directly affect that >company (which is what we've done so far). > > - I think ideally the candidate would be somebody who represents the >long tail of volunteer community members who don't work on Git as >part of their day-job. The current members have a fairly skewed view >in that respect. At the same time, we can't really represent the >_really_ long tail of infrequent contributors, by the "stick around" >criterion above. Thanks both Christian and Ævar for giving more details on your situations elsewhere in the thread. I do think neither of you is quite in the "I just do this in my spare time" situation. But I also think that situation is going to be inversely correlated with being active in the project and wanting to spend time on governance stuff. So IMHO some compromise there is necessary. And I feel like both of you can represent those interests, even if they're not exactly the situation you're in. So what next? There was a little bit of off-list discussion (mostly nominations to avoid putting the candidate on the spot), but no new public candidates. I'm happy to entertain more discussion here, but it seems like everybody is reasonably happy with these two names. So either Junio and I can pick one, or possibly we could have both (that gives us a 4-person committee, but again, tied votes haven't been an issue so far). Any final thoughts are welcome. Also, on a more meta-level, I'm happy to hear any thoughts about this process that we might want to enshrine for later iterations. This is obviously not nearly as formal as something like Debian elections. But I don't think we're a big enough community to need that. So my attempt is to just keep things informal, but try to give as many opportunities as possible for people to speak up. -Peff
Re: Git Project Leadership Committee
On Fri, Aug 17, 2018 at 12:41 AM, Jeff King wrote: > So here are the nominations I came up with. If you'd like to nominate > somebody else (or yourself!), please do. If you have opinions, let me > know (public or private, as you prefer). > > - Christian Couder > - Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason Thanks for nominating both! > Both are active, have been around a long time, and have taken part in > non-code activities and governance discussions. My understanding is that > Christian freelances on Git, which doesn't quite fit my "volunteer > representative" request, but I think contracting on Git is its own > interesting perspective to represent (and certainly he spent many years > on the volunteer side). Yeah, I am freelancing since October 2015 mostly for GitLab, Booking.com and Protocol Labs as can be seen on my LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-couder-569a731/ I feel lucky to be considered mostly like a regular employee especially by GitLab and Protocol Labs. Both of these companies employ a high ratio of remote developers from around the world, who often have some kind of freelance legal status, so they give them as much as possible the same kind of perks or incentives (like stock options) as regular employees. GitLab is a very open and transparent company. The way it works is described in details in its Handbook (https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/). Its informal policy regarding Git has been to use regular released versions of Git in GitLab. If possible GitLab should use a recent version of Git to benefit from the latest improvements, though it should be compatible with old versions of Git, as this can be useful for example to people who want to build GitLab from source on top of a regular Linux distro that comes with an old Git. So for GitLab my work on Git has to be integrated upstream. I have been working on remote odb related things, which I haven't managed to get merged yet, and on a few other small things like delta islands for which things have been going better so far. I also do some Git support at GitLab (for Git users, GitLab developers, customers, sales people, ...). I am sponsored by them to participate in or give presentations at conferences (like FOSSASIA 2017, GSoC Mentor Summit, Bloomberg Hackathon, Git Merge, GitLab Summit, ...). And sometimes I do other marketing, security, developer relations or sales (like meeting a few French customers) related things. Ævar already talked in details about Booking.com and my work for them. I have been working much less for Protocol Labs than for GitLab or Booking.com since I started working for GitLab around 2 years ago. As with Git I had started working on my free time on IPFS (https://ipfs.io/) before I became a freelance working on it. So for Protocol Labs I have been using Sharness (https://github.com/chriscool/sharness/, which was created in 2011 by extracting t/test-lib.sh from Git) to add and maintain end to end tests to go-IPFS and other IPFS related projects. Around one year ago Protocol Labs made a successful ICO (Initial Coin Offering) for Filecoin (https://filecoin.io/) and since then things have become a bit more like in a regular company (which is not necessarily bad). I have also had a few consulting contracts from various French companies for a few days each about consulting or teaching Git/GitLab.
Re: Git Project Leadership Committee
On Thu, Aug 16 2018, Jeff King wrote: > - Christian Couder > - Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason Thanks for the nomination. I'm happy to help the project by serving on the leadership committee if you'll have me. > Both are active, have been around a long time, and have taken part in > non-code activities and governance discussions. My understanding is that > Christian freelances on Git, which doesn't quite fit my "volunteer > representative" request, but I think contracting on Git is its own > interesting perspective to represent (and certainly he spent many years > on the volunteer side). I'd say I'd mostly be a "volunteer representative", but in the interest of full disclosure here's the extent to which I'm not. I'm involved in internal Git infrastructure at my employer, Booking.com, and some of the the work I do on git is company sponsored, since it happens to be stuff Booking.com needs from git. E.g. my recent fetch.fsck.* series is one example of that, as well as the "fetch.pruneTags" option in 2.17. Booking.com doesn't really have any sort of git.git infrastructure team in the sense that Microsoft & GitHub do. I'm on the team which, among other things, manages our internal GitLab installation and git-related things in general. I'm trusted to spend company time on patching git when that's the easiest or best way to accomplish some task. Usually I don't even discuss the specifics of that with anyone, I just go ahead and do it. I'm not aware of Booking.com, or its parent company Booking Holdings (or sister companies) in any way being involved in any business model that involves Git (unlike say GitHub, Atlassian etc). So I can't imagine any situation where I'd need to recuse myself due to real or perceived conflict of interest, but would of course do so if there was even the appearance of impropriety. Booking.com has also had a contract with Christian Couder to work on things in git.git since 2015-ish. E.g. the rebase speedups Christian did and the ongoing work on reftables is paid for by Booking.com. During this time I've been the person tasked with managing the work that Christian is doing on git.git for Booking.com, in a very loose sense of "managing". It's usually just e.g. "hey rebase performance kind of sucks, can you work on it?" "sure!". I know Christian also does contract work for GitLab, e.g. I understand that his delta island integration work these days is done on their behalf, but I'll let him provide details on that or any other corporate entanglements he may have to the extent he feels it's relevant.
Re: Git Project Leadership Committee
On Sat, Aug 18, 2018 at 07:32:38PM -0700, Elijah Newren wrote: > On Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 3:43 PM Jeff King wrote: > > - we should avoid anyone who is affiliated with a company that already > >has a member on the committee. So nobody from Google and nobody from > >GitHub. I would extend that to Microsoft, too, given a certain > >impending acquisition. I'd expect anybody who is affiliated with a > >company to recuse themselves from decisions that directly affect that > >company (which is what we've done so far). > > That might make it hard for some of us to nominate others, since as > far as I can tell (e.g. looking at shortlog -sne output) few git > contributors use work email addresses to do so and we don't > necessarily know employers of other contributors. I would say to err on the side of nominating, and the candidate can provide the information. -Peff
Re: Git Project Leadership Committee
On Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 3:43 PM Jeff King wrote: > - we should avoid anyone who is affiliated with a company that already >has a member on the committee. So nobody from Google and nobody from >GitHub. I would extend that to Microsoft, too, given a certain >impending acquisition. I'd expect anybody who is affiliated with a >company to recuse themselves from decisions that directly affect that >company (which is what we've done so far). That might make it hard for some of us to nominate others, since as far as I can tell (e.g. looking at shortlog -sne output) few git contributors use work email addresses to do so and we don't necessarily know employers of other contributors. > So here are the nominations I came up with. If you'd like to nominate > somebody else (or yourself!), please do. If you have opinions, let me > know (public or private, as you prefer). > > - Christian Couder > - Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason I think either of them would be excellent choices.
Re: Git Project Leadership Committee
Jeff King writes: > Here are _my_ opinions on how we should fill the role > ... > So here are the nominations I came up with. If you'd like to nominate > somebody else (or yourself!), please do. If you have opinions, let me > know (public or private, as you prefer). > > - Christian Couder > - Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason FWIW, even though my opinions might be slightly different in some detail (e.g. I would not place as much weight on "ideally a non-professional person" as Peff does), I pretty-much agree with Peff on both the selection criteria and the nominations. Thanks.
