Greetings EE4J PMC.
You may have noticed that we've received a pretty healthy batch of new committer election notices...
According to the Eclipse Development Process, in order for a committer election to be considered valid, a demonstration of merit is required. Generally, merit is demonstrated with publicly accessible links to tangible contributions by the nominee to the project in the nomination statement.
Any minimum measure of quantity and quality of those contributions is left to the discretion of the PMC. Having said that, there has to be some minimum that's greater than zero. Basically, we need at least some visible proof that the nominee understands the Eclipse Development Process and is a good fit with the project team. This is part of operating in an open and transparent manner; the demonstration of merit is open for all to see.
Having said all that, projects that are bootstrapping are in a bit of a special state and some amount of leeway during this bootstrapping period is, IMHO, reasonable. I recommend that we permit the current batch of elections to progress per the usual process and respect the outcome of the vote by the project teams.
In the steady state (e.g. after the first release), we'll need to tighten up the requirements and decide what sort of minimum bar that we'd like to set for a merit statement. This should be documented (I've opened an
issue to track this).
I'll also take this opportunity to note that the employment status of a nominee must not be a factor in a project role election.
I'll wrap this up by acknowledging that the election process is optimized for electing a single individual to a single project and I appreciate the level of monotony involved with trying to get somebody onto multiple projects.
Wayne
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Wayne Beaton
Director of Open Source Projects
The Eclipse Foundation
