Skip to main content
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] [List Home]
Re: [incubation] How do project committers vote on proposals which affect the projects community?
I have found an request for comment or proposal workflow very helpful for strategically discussing the roadmap across organizations. Many groups model based on the internet RFC model and voting...

I have seen two approaches that do not require infrastructure investment:
- Use the wiki (which provides a nice record of what was approved that can be linked to)
- Smaller projects often just use an email thread and managed votes there.

There are some business considerations to keep in mind:
- The availability of a published RFC process has helped in outreach to organizations that carefully manage their infrastructure using a "change control process".
- A practical benefit is inviting external parties to communicate before they sink a bunch of time into a pull request, and can be used to identify areas for collaboration.
- With good communication contractors can use the proposal and community review as a contract milestone reducing risk around consulting activities.
- Proposal also helps capture incomplete ideas where budget has not been obtained for docs / testing / etc...

It is always sad when "customer" has paid for functionality that is rejected by a project community.

I would fully support the eclipse infrastructure allowing for proposals to be voted on, it is something we asked for on locationtech but were told that was up to each project at the time.

References:
- GeoServer: proposals (and developers guide procedure)

--
Jody Garnett


On Mon, 2 Dec 2019 at 23:19, Filip Jeremic <fjeremic@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi everyone,

I'm a committer on the Eclipse OMR project [1]. The committers along with the community have discussed (with general agreement) reformatting the entire source code repository using clang-format automation. Given such a change will affect everyone working on the project it falls in the realm of adhering to an official committer vote. We are having trouble finding concrete information of how to properly conduct such a vote.

The Eclipse Project Handbook [2], along with the Eclipse Development Process section 4.7 are the relevant notes we were able to find which say:

> Committers are required to track, participate in, and vote on, relevant discussions in their associated Projects. There are three voting responses: +1 (yes), -1 (no, or veto), and 0 (abstain).

Voting on new committers via the Committer Election process is explicitly stated. However this formatting change we are going to propose is not a Committer Election, so we are not sure how to properly count the committer votes. Does votting on such a matter adhere to the same rules as a Comitter Election? Depending on votes on such a proposal are counted will influence the scope of the proposal itself as one may choose to propose smaller or larger scope changes which may have a higher chance of succeeding, depending on how votes are counted.

Some explicit questions:

1. Does anyone have a reference to some guidance or examples on how such votes should be conducted?
2. Do individual projects have the freedom of establishing a Project Charter which explicitly defines how such votes are to be conducted (similar to the Eclipse IDE Project Charter [3])?
- If so how is such a Charter initially established?

[1] https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/technology.omr
[2] https://www.eclipse.org/projects/handbook/#4_7_Committers_and_Contributors
[3] https://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/eclipse-charter.php

Regards,
Filip Jeremic

_______________________________________________
incubation mailing list
incubation@xxxxxxxxxxx
To change your delivery options, retrieve your password, or unsubscribe from this list, visit
https://www.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/incubation

Back to the top