[RFC] Community Diversity and How to Encourage Collaboration

[Tianqi Chen]

Dear Incubator General:
I am writing this email to seek your experience on how do you try to
encourage diversity in your community and encourage collaboration among
contributors across organizations. One of the key driving force of Apache
is its neural nature which encourages collaboration among different
organizations. On the other hand, admittedly usually each community have
its majority organization.
As an Apache contributor, and while building another open source
projects. I always wonder how could we best encourage collaboration among
organizations.

   Recently I tried to propose a guideline to MXNet community to encourage
PMC members to propose committers that comes from different organizations
that they come from.

   There is certainly some is a controversy in this, and I would like to
see what is the opinions of the people here on whether this is an
appropriate thing to try in an Apache community.

Thanks!

Tianqi

Re: [RFC] Community Diversity and How to Encourage Collaboration

[Justin Mclean]

HI,

>   Recently I tried to propose a guideline to MXNet community to encourage
> PMC members to propose committers that comes from different organizations
> that they come from.

It shouldn't matter at all who a potential committer works for, their merit is 
gained by what they do as an individual. Encouraging PPMC members to look 
outside their organisation for potential committers is fine, but they should 
already be doing that.

If they are currently only putting forward people who work at their own company 
then there is an issue. I’ve not looked so this may not be the case here. All 
contributions from anybody should be treated equally irrespective of who they 
work for.

Perhaps there is another issue here?  Usually I find that podlings set the bar 
too high for committership and it's often hard for people who are not employed 
to work on the project to get committership, this eventually harms community 
growth and makes for a less diverse group of committers.  Sometimes the issue 
is that people who contribute slow continual contributions over time go 
unnoticed.

Even though a number of committers have been voted in, given the large number 
of contributors [1] (629!) perhaps it time to make more people committers?

Thanks,
Justin

1. https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet/graphs/contributors


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