This is a sub-thread of the state of the project one initiated by Davor. Since this subject can be part of the community issues I would like to focus on the state of the project for its contributors so we don’t mix the discussion with the end-user thread.
I hope other members of the community bring ideas or issues that we have/can improve to make contribution to this project easier and welcoming. I consider that this is a really important area, we need to guarantee that we have a sane culture for the project, where we respect contributors and anyone can feel safe to ask questions, propose ideas and contribute. We have done a good job until now but of course things can be still improved. Some ideas: * Code of conduct We don’t have a code of conduct, most communities deal with this only when problems arise. I think we should discuss this in advance, we can maybe write ours, or adopt one existing like the ASF one. It is essential that if we accept one code of conduct we really do take it into account, and respect it during all our community interactions, and apply actions in the cases when someone doesn’t. https://www.apache.org/foundation/policies/conduct.html * Proposal process So far we have a somehow loose but effective process with documents shared on google docs, and further discussion in the mailing list, we should formalize a bit more or finish the work on BEAM-566. Some guidelines on blockers for new proposals should be specified, e.g. backwards compatibility, etc. And most of this documents will better end as part of the website or some wiki for historical preservation. * Governance model Our governance model is of course based on Apache’s meritocracy one, we should encourage this, and always be aligned with the ASF policies, but also we need better criteria for consensus in technical decisions, so far the vote system has been a way to reach consensus but we have to find better ways to balance situations that can seem arbitrary or where technical decisions have to be made even with a lack of consensus, transparency and clear communication are key to avoid frustration. * Contribution policies So far we as a community have been welcoming on new contributions, but sometimes the contribution process seems harder than it should be. We need to make it as simple as possible: - Avoid CI issues: Extremely long tests that break for unrelated issues should be minimized - Review of pull requests should take less time than the current average (We should probably get some stats on this / define what is an acceptable review time and what is the expected process when a reviewer is not active). - We should add the previously discussed policy on stale PRs to the contribution guide. - Encourage a well balanced distribution of reviews, there are some committers that do many reviews, and of course this is not ideal. - Give priority for reviews / help to new contributors that are starting in the project or to critical fixes. - Clear guidelines for the criteria to earn commitership/PMC status. We should probably add these to the contribution guide or some other document. See Flink’s for example. https://flink.apache.org/how-to-contribute.html#how-to-become-a-committer If you have some other ideas or issues that you would like to discuss please share them in this thread.
