Hi Everyone, I read this thread and got a few comments according to how well I was able to track all statements and arguments. English is not my first language and it was hard for me to keep track of the current state of this discussion. Complicated words and sentence structure were used to state points by authors here, to the point I was almost giving up commenting.
In any case, as Naomi stated, I don't want to muddy the waters, just wanted to exemplify why we often hear from specific people in certain mailing lists/projects, making it hard for us to truly follow a meritocracy model. I extracted 2 main convos 1) Choose a better term to use instead of meritocracy. 2) improve the way Apache projects and the foundation recognize project collaboration. For 1) I personally think the word meritocracy isn't the problem. If you translate it to Spanish, the word is fair and adecuate to describe the governance model the foundation follows. I believe the problem is that the concept of merit awarding is broken and often related to Bias from the group assigning the merit. This said, according to the article, I understand that the problem is that the core group of an organization awarding contributions would be Bias and therefore will perpetuate unfair development. My conclusion is that, the word isn't the problem, the problem is in the system. This being said, I have no preference in wether we should change it or not. Since Rich, Bertrand and others are putting efforts into defining better the language, I support that with no opossition. 2) From my personal experience supporting projects under the Apache model, I can say that the difficulty in assigning fair and unbiased merit to people in the community comes from lack of process and tools. For example, in Apache Beam, we've been working on several advocacy effort which have helped the project's brand grow, and surface areas of improvement for the tech. However, the PMC committee doesn't have full visibility in how much effort comes from each individual, since only one representative sits with us during planning meetings. On the other hand, when I talk to other PMC members about possible new committers, I hear names of people I don't know because I don't interact with their part of the project, making me think that it's unfair others get recognized over people organizing Summits or community efforts. We are in the middle of defining a better process to bring visibility of efforts to everyone in the project and make the committership process more fair and transparent. This aligns with the efforts Sally recently posted on non-code contribution recognition and I think solving this should support Naomi's original statement: meritocracy will beging to "work" and diversity will start to flourish. Happy to help build better practices and processes to make fair recognition and diversity win.
