Disclaimers

Note this page was written in 2020 at the conception of the Core Contributor Program and thus current terminology, requirements, and implementation details may differ from what this document and its children pages describe. Specifically, the program herein described is now known as the “Core Contributor Program Committers”, whereas previously it was “Core Committers”.

Phase 2 Objective

“Co-establish and publish Core Committer program”

Building upon learnings from the pilot, in this phase we focus on officially establishing and publishing the CC program in collaboration with the participants in the pilot.

• Review. Review the status of Phase 1 goals and achievements.

• Retro. Collect feedback and input in the form of a retrospective of the pilot program.

• Rules. Co-establish rules for the future of the program.

  • What outcomes can we expect of Core Committers in the future? Reflect on what CCs already accomplished in the Pilot. How far can we stretch ourselves for future wins?

  • How can we improve the program going forward? Reflect on the Retro board and consider what actions we should take.

  • Who (not looking for specific names) should be invited to the program, with what selection criteria?

• Publish. Document and publish updates to the CC program, along with its updated rights, responsibilities, and selection process. When published, communicate that the program is still in its infancy and yet to be fully developed (to be scalable in phase 3).

Phase 2 Board

Miro board: Core Committer Phase 2

Open

Open

Retro - Summary as Text

• Liked - Existence of the program:

  • Energy it brings in the community, resulting from trust (given ownership) & being valued, giving confidence to contribute (+++)

  • Unblocked a lot of pending contributions by speeding up/helping with OSPR reviews (+++)

  • Ownership granted pushed to get the perspective of the project (“does this belong in the core”)

  • Deepened & established relationships (across organizations, including edX)

• Learned:

  • Best value when organizational goals can be aligned with the pilot (+++)

  • Community knowledge of the project is strong, and can be trusted

  • Many deepened their knowledge of the Open edX project & of open source project management because of the CC/Champion duties

  • Communication with contributors on PRs can be hard (shown core committers the other side of OSPR reviews)

• Lacked:

  • Time! Not enough allocated / prioritized by the participating organizations (+++++)

    • More time explicitly allocated by organizations to core committers (tickets in sprints, weekly quotas, etc.)

    • Leaderboard to provide clarity and organizational accountability (+ friendly competition )

  • More streamlined process: (+++)

    • Better PR descriptions

    • Make it clearer for contributors and simpler overall

    • Avoid/speedup the blocking product review

    • Better ways to get questions answered & obtain approvals (when missing context or unsure about a decision)

  • Better onboarding of contributors:

    • Better material for new contributors/devs (course, docs)

    • More reliable devstack (broken devstack often a time-consuming blocker, also for core committers)

  • More reviewers on each repository (extend responsibilities of core committers, add new core committers)

  • Information about tasks & projects corresponding to the PRs (access to roadmap, Jira tickets)

  • Non-developer core committers?

Reference: Phase 2 Planning