PCDM Committers Process

The Portland Common Data Model (PCDM) is open source and released under an Apache 2.0 license. The ontology, software and associated documentation is developed collectively by a community of [contributors](PCDM Contributors) and [committers](PCDM Committers). All interested community members are encouraged to contribute to the project. Contributors who demonstrate sustained engagement with the project through quality participation in meetings, mailing lists, documentation and code updates can be nominated by existing committers to also become a committers. It should be emphasized that committers need not be limited to software developers. Community members with skills in documentation and testing, for example, can also be committers.

Rights

Committers share the following rights:

• Write access to the codebase
• Nomination privileges of new committers
• Release management privileges
• Access to the private committers mailing list
• Binding votes on procedural, code modification, and release issues

Voting

In order to ensure that there is consensus when making a change to content maintained by the PCDM community, a successful poll of the committers is required. Votes on requested changes are submitted by posting comments to the relevant Github pull request or issue. To be successful, a poll needs 👍/+1 votes from three or more committers (excluding the author of the pull request), with no 👎/-1 votes within 7 days of the most recent commit or substantial edit to the requested change.

Responsibilities

Committers share the following responsibilities:

• Monitor and respond to project mailing lists
• Attend project and technical meetings
• Monitor and vet bug-tracker issues
• Review and commit code contributions
• Ensure code contributions are properly licensed
• Guide and mentor new committers

Guidelines for assessing new candidates for committership

When a contributor is nominated to become a committer, the following guidelines should be used by existing committers to evaluate the nominee's suitability.

Ability to work cooperatively with peers

How do we evaluate? By the interactions they have through mail. By how they respond to criticism. By how they participate in decision-making process.

Ability to be a mentor

How do we evaluate? By the interactions they have through mail. By how clear they are and how willing they are to point at appropriate background materials (or even create them).

Community

How do we evaluate? By the interactions they have through mail. Do they help to answer questions raised on the mailing list; do they show a helpful attitude and respect for other's ideas.

Commitment

How do we evaluate? By time, by sticking through tough issues, by helping on not-so-fun tasks as well.

Personal skill/ability

How do we evaluate? A solid general understanding of the project. Quality of discussion in mail. Patches (where applicable) easy to apply with only a cursory review.

New Committer Process

This section describes the process for handling the voting of a new committer.

Summary:

1. Call a vote (templates/committerVote.txt)
2. Close a vote (templates/closeCommitterVote.txt)
3. Invite the new committer (templates/committerInvite.txt)

If they accept, then do:

1. Add to Committer team of GitHub PCDM organization
2. Add to pcdm-committers google-group
3. Add to committers wiki page: PCDM Committers
4. Announce the new committer (template/committerAnnounce.txt)