First off, I recommend this reading this page to understand what the Apache
NiFi PMC draws from when making a decision

http://community.apache.org/contributors/index.html

I thought it would be helpful for me to walk through how I interpret that
guidance, and what that means for NiFi. For those that didn't read, there
are four aspects of contribution that are worth considering someone for
committership: community, project, documentation and code. Really, the
committer decision comes down to: has this person built up enough merit in
the community that I have a high degree of confidence that I trust him/her
with write access to the code and website.

Given that merit and trust are subjective measures, how does the PMC make
those decisions? We, the PMC, have attempted to make this as evidence-based
as possible. When discussing a contributor for being considered for
committer access, we attempt to put together a corpus of interaction in the
community, both negative and positive, and use this as a basis for
discussion. The interaction with the community can include:

- Interaction on the mailing lists - is this person helping others? Is this
person using the community to enhance his/her understanding of the project
or the apache foundation?
- Code contributions - is this person contributing code that advances the
project? How important is the code? Is this a niche capability, a core
capability? How challenging was the code? Was the code improving the
quality of the project (bug fix, adding  tests, or code that comes along
with comprehensive unit and/or integration tests). How does this person
react to criticism of his/her contribution? Is this person reacting
positively to patch or pull request feedback? Is the code high quality?
- Assisting others with their contributions - is this person providing
useful comments on pull requests or patches? Is this person testing new
features/functionality and providing feedback on the mailing list?
- Participating in project votes and discussions: is this person helping to
verify releases? Providing input to the roadmap? Is this person using the
lists to get feedback on features he/she plan to implement?
- Documentation contributions - is this person helping the community by
blogging? providing patches to the web page or in-app docs? contributing to
the project wiki?
- Other community/project activities - has this person organized or talked
at a meetup? has this person briefed at a conference or workshop?
- "Going over and beyond" factor - Has this person done something
exceptional to demonstrate dedication to the project? e.g. did this person
go to great lengths to fix or diagnose a critical issue?

An underlying theme of the above: the ASF code of conduct [1] is taken
seriously by the PMC - while interacting with the community, was this
person adhering to the guidelines? Are we seeing a pattern of openness,
empathy, inquisitiveness, and willingness to cooperate? Has this person
shown remorse for interaction that may have violated the code of conduct
and a positive trend since?

It helps for a committer to have evidence supporting all four aspects of
contribution. It also helps to have demonstrated this over an extended
period of time. I personally like to see at least 3 months of strong
contribution.

This is a start of the discussion, I'm hoping others can weigh in.

1. http://www.apache.org/foundation/policies/conduct.html

Tony

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