Thanks, Carin for bringing this topic up. I have suggested this several times. But would like to do it again. One approach toward building a more diverse community is to acknowledge the fact that we want to encourage interactions in the Apache way beyond our physical cycle.
One principle to toward that is to encourage PMC members only nominate committers from other organizations, so it encourages interactions and gives incentives overall for general participation. This way does not prevent people from getting nominated (The PMC member who is non-colleague will nominate the person with merit), and also encourage broad participation (I can tell my fellows to participate in community discussion because it is really up to other PMC members to propose them). Of course, this requires some trust in the community toward positive community building, which may or may not doable here. But nevertheless, I think it is a good principle. Tianqi On Sat, Mar 2, 2019 at 9:13 AM Carin Meier <carinme...@gmail.com> wrote: > I wanted to kickoff a discussion about community building. There was an > excellent blog post from the Apache Beam Community on this > https://blogs.apache.org/comdev/entry/an-approach-to-community-building > > In it they wanted to improve their contributor/committer base in the > following ways which resonate with our project as well, quoting from the > article: > > >>>> > 1. We could use more committers to review all the code being contributed, > in part due to recent departure of a few committers > > 2. We want our contributor-base (hence committer-base) to be more spread > across companies and backgrounds. This is a core value of the Apache > Software Foundation. In particular, the project's direction should not be > dominated by any company, and the project should be able to survive the > departure of a major contributor or all contributors from a particular > employer. Eventually, we hope that our user base is active and diverse > enough that this happens naturally. But we are not there yet, so instead we > have to work hard to build our community around the software we already > have. > >>>> > > > They outlined some of the steps that they took to achieve positive results > in the article, which I encourage everyone to read. > > Every community is different, however, so things that worked well in their > community might not be as effective as in ours. I wanted to kick off a > discussion for ideas that people had here on community building for MXNet. > > Ideas and thoughts on this are most welcome. > > - Carin >
