Something that the Mahout PMC might want to do is share the (rough) criteria for becoming a Mahout committer. In many projects, this is quite vague and leaves a lot of leeway up to the PMC, which is desirable for a variety of reasons. However the reason I mention it is that up until now, others I've spoken to within the Hadoop community have felt that large new algorithm contributions are basically what will earn someone committership on Mahout. Based on this thread, consensus seems to be forming that that is *not* what is desired. So what's your rough ideal committer at this point in the life of Mahout if they are not contributing new algorithms? I guess it's things like code reviews, correctness fixes, perf improvements, and refactorings / enhancements?
Regarding attribution, I saw it mentioned elsewhere in this thread and I noticed it myself so I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents. While it seems like a small thing, I wonder whether instituting the Hadoopish "Contributed by so-and-so" in commit messages to assign credit for patches by non-committers would be help make contributors feel more appreciated for their work. Especially if you want to encourage people to contribute lots of small patches on their way to committership. Alternatively, putting "(Joe Newbie via Jim Veteran)" into every commit also acknowledges the committer/reviewer, which is not an easy job and can help people feel appreciated for that work as well. Finally, if there are places where the current committers know Mahout needs work, or has holes, have those been articulated in any specific way? If not I think that would be awesome. I know that in general, several of the docs are out of date on the wiki. I suppose that's one. I wonder what else tops the to-do list. Is there something other than just the open JIRA list < https://issues.apache.org/jira/issues/?jql=project%20%3D%20MAHOUT%20AND%20status%20%3D%20Open%20ORDER%20BY%20priority%20DESC >? Hope this helps. Regards, Mike On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 7:12 PM, Daniel Longest <dlong...@gmail.com> wrote: > I've been a lurker on this list for a few months and trying to figure > out a way to contribute. I'm very interested in ML but am not a > professional in it. I am a fulltime .NET developer by trade, but have > used Java academically (undergrad and grad school). I would love the > opportunity to contribute in a testing or optimization capacity if > someone could help point me in the right direction. > > Regards, > Daniel > > > > > > As a side note on GSoC: At least at German universities the general > concept of > > GSoC isn't particularly well known which makes me think that reaching > out to > > students could be helpful. I'm aware of two PhD. students on this list > who > > probably know students with good coding skills - it might be worth the > effort > > reaching out to those directly for testing and optimisation tasks. > > >
