Core Contributor - Organization Commitment Standard

Owned by Xavier Antoviaque
Mar 15, 2024
2 min read

Background

When the Core Contributor program was created, the founding organizations jointly released a statement, committing publicly to dedicate resources to the project as part of the program.

The type and volume of commitment has been originally set freely by each organization. Over time, as more organizations joined, the need to keep the program fair to all parties increased, to keep the tragedy of the commons at bay and ensure that every organization part of the program contributes a fair share of the work.

Proposal

To this effect, we are proposing to standardize the commitment of all organizations by aligning on the most commonly expressed commitment of 20h/month per core contributor.

Pros & Cons

It isn’t a perfect criteria, but it is the most neutral one, and the most easy to measure and compare across organizations to ensure fairness. It doesn’t try to compare or judge the relative value of different types of work, of level of skill, of technical vs non-technical – ultimately, we consider that any work that is considered as core contributor work is equally valuable. The only criteria we use is how much time did the contributor invest into the work, as that’s ultimately what really costs us all - both figuratively and literally for organizations who pay their members.

There are a couple of common objections to using this criteria though, which we try to address here:

  • Measuring time is a pain in the $$$ - it can indeed be tricky to track time precisely. It is fine to just include a “best guess” or rough estimate.

  • It is disadvantageous to small organizations or individuals – it is true that a larger organization will have more resources to dedicate to the project. That said, this is going to be true regardless of the criteria used, as in any case the number of core contributors that an organization will be able to get to join the program will be related to its size. And in a way, that's part of the goal – to get larger organizations to commit more work. The important bit being that the required commitment per core contributor shouldn’t be too large, and exclude smaller organizations or individuals from being able to get at least one core contributor to join the program. While 20h/month isn’t a negligible amount of work, experience has proven that it’s a reasonable volume to put into contributing.

Also, to take into account the fact that smaller teams or individuals don’t have the same level of specialization of roles, the commitment is an average over six months; also, in small teams, different team members can compensate for the unavailability of others.