At tCRIL we’ve been thinking a lot about the core contributor role. In particular, how does it relate to tCRIL employment? Should tCRIL engineers working on Open edX be branded as core contributors? Should we go through the full nomination process from the beginning? Some sort of hybrid?
My thinking is that it doesn’t hurt us to go through the full process but there were concerns that it may not be a good use of everyone’s time?
There’s also the question of what level of access should tCRIL engineers get? Currently many of us are owners of the openedx org on github. This is not something any other core contributors have, how do we reconcile this?
What do others think about this? We at tCRIL thought it would be useful to get thoughts from the community on this before we come to any conclusions.
@feanil Thank you for bringing up that topic! It is an important one, and it says a lot about the good intentions of the project that this is considered. Imho it would be tremendously useful to have everyone gaining their rights/permissions as a core contributor. Granting these based on the history of contributions rather than only on organization affiliation would show dedication to a meritocratic approach, and ensure the quality of the core team.
Also, the dogfooding that becoming core contributor ensures should help to see the program from the inside, and allow to know better how to improve and manage it.
It makes sense for the current tCRIL team to have the ownership of the openedx organization – after all you’re creating “Open edX” as a standalone organization currently, and are asked to run it. But maybe from now, the assignation of these rights to other people could be through the core contributor program? Including for members of tCRIL, or edX/2U? And welcoming of other community members?
+1. There’s inevitably going to be a lot of grandfathering-in, just for the sake of keeping the project running smoothly. But for newcomers, I happen to think it’s a good idea to use the CC program. For reference, this is exactly how my own expanded access as a member of the tCRIL team has been handled so far.
Thanks for bringing up the topic, I concur with Xavier that it says a lot that is being openly discussed.
I think that owning the organization openedx could be considered as a permission on itself. Something that gets voted on for a new person to get those rights. This means just as Adolfo did, new members of tcril would not get them on day one, but instead a consultation process is followed.
Owning the org would be like being core commiter on a repo, and this two points of the current voting system:
Candidates coming from an organization must have support from someone outside their organization. This can be done by having a sponsor from outside their organization, or by receiving at least one “yes” vote from someone outside their organization. This is to ensure that core contributors are evaluated on their ability to communicate with the community, outside of their org.
For roles with few existing members, it is encouraged to ask CCs of other roles to help evaluate the candidate.
would ensure someone else is involved from outside tcril joins in the vote, and that current members that own the org also vote and give their approval.
Thanks for the feedback! It sounds there is consensus that as new employees join tCRIL having them go through the CC process is desired and this makes sense to me. I’m not clear about people’s thoughts on the existing tCRIL engineers. Would the community find it useful if we had myself, Dave O, Kyle, and Carlos go through the CC process?
It also sounds like having a org admin level access as a high level role and just having the community approve it would be desirable, I don’t currently see any issues with doing that as well.
And me - I don’t mind having my repo access curtailed, although I’ve currently been doing a lot of bulk changes across all repos. I also have been pretty active as an org admin. I’m quite willing to justify my access requirements, and even to have them revisited periodically (as need be).
@feanil@sarina You have already I think gained your status as core by your actions and contributions to the community, now and in the past. So going through the process would be mostly about officializing a title that you have already long deserved. But that can also be a nice gesture from you to do this, so I would say go for it. We, the core contributors, are a nice bunch, you’d be most welcomed
Also imho it’s fine to indicate the rights that you already have de facto, and fine for you to keep those in the current transition. The rules on gaining privileges and permissions through core committership can apply going forward. In the future, there would be other tools where the firsts admins would be different community members.
