As announced by @nimisha in June, we have started experimenting with a core committers program, to extend the range of responsibility that community members who aren’t employed by edX can take on:
The idea being to start small, to figure out the base principles before progressively extending it. Nine long-standing contributors have been selected, and are the current core committers (kudos! 
):
They were assisted by a team of volunteer edX employees, aka “champions”, who were helping to remove any blockers on the path of core committers (thanks! )
You can read more about the program on the Open edX Core Committers page of the wiki.
This phase has been completed, with success! And @nimisha has initiated phase 2, which is about learning from the experience gathered in phase 1, and preparing to grow the program to a larger set of core committers and responsibility.
Retrospective of Phase 1
Given the geographical spread of core committers over many timezones, a large part of the retrospective and brainstorming work was done asynchronously. @nimisha had setup a nice Miro board where core committers and edX champions commented:
I encourage you to go through the board, starting from the left - it allows to follow these steps as anyone else who participated in the review. If you are in a hurry, specific point of interest are:
(Click on the screenshots to access the relevant part of the Miro board)
1) Pictures of the nice faces of everyone involved
Btw, @nimisha has also prepared a cute video showcasing the core committers and some of the achievements of the program 
2) Review of the goals set by core committers for phase 1
3) Videos of the core committers, commenting on what went well & what to improve
4) Retrospective recap
You can also find the summary section on the Core Committers Phase 2 wiki page.
Conclusions
To complete the process, and decide on the conclusions and actions to take, at the end of the asynchronous discussions, we held a synchronous meeting in Zoom. We split into three groups, to figure out:
- What outcomes would be expected out of the core committer program in the future
- How we can improve the program moving forward
- Who should be invited to become core committer in the future, ie what the selection criteria should be
The outcome was a series of proposals made by the group, which are now being considered. You can read the detail of these proposals in the above view, as well as in the resulting recap of action items & tentative planning of their implementation:
@nimisha has also entered those next steps on a new core committer tasks board on github - comments welcome there!
Don’t hesitate if you have any comment or question while going through this - it’s already a pretty long post, so I didn’t get into the details of each of the points raised during the retro, or of the proposed items for the future. Hopefully the Miro board and the new task board should give enough details, but this thread is also to allow a broader community discussion about the core committers program.
