Open Stack

On 2017-02-23 02:12 PM, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
> On 2017-02-23 18:37:49 +0000 (+0000), Cathy Zhang wrote:
>> I strongly support the proposal to mandate this. To be fair, I
>> think TC should mandate this across all projects. In many
>> complicated and technically hard commits, co-author does not make
>> any less amount of technical contribution to the commit. If just
>> the owner is counted, people will start to fight for the ownership
>> of a commit which is not healthy for the open source community.
>>
>> For my own case, it is well known that I am the initiator and
>> project lead of this networking-sfc project and have contributed a
>> lot to this project on the technical side and project management
>> side. I have done many reviews and approvals in this cycle and
>> co-authored quite some commits. It is a surprise to me that
>> co-author is not counted as technical contributor in Neutron.
> The technical limitations for this in the past have been twofold:
>
> 1. Gerrit did not provide a usable API for querying arbitrary
> substrings from commit messages.
>
> 2. Voters must be foundation individual members and we had no way to
> query the foundation member database by contributor E-mail address.
>
> The first is less of an issue in the version of Gerrit we're running
> now and the second is a situation I'm collaborating with the
> foundation's development team to attempt to resolve. In the
> meantime, the solution has been that PTLs should entertain requests
> from co-authors to be added to the "extra ATCs" list for their
> project. I don't personally have any objection to letting change
> co-authors vote in elections, we just don't (yet) have a solution to
> be able to automatically verify whether they're authorized to vote
> under our bylaws and charter.
>
> Separately, there was a problem back when we used to provide free
> conference passes to code contributors, where someone at a company
> would submit a punctuation fix to a comment in some project, add
> half a dozen of their co-workers as co-authors, and then ask for
> free admission for all of them (this really happened). Relying on
> PTLs to vet extra ATCs before adding them was how we mitigated this.
> Now that we no longer rely directly on code contributions to decide
> who should get free/discounted conference admission this issue
> should hopefully be purely historical. People seem to be far less
> interested in gaming elections than going to conferences (or in some
> cases scalping free tickets as a money-making scheme).
In addition, under the bylaws 3. (b) (ii) 
https://www.openstack.org/legal/technical-committee-member-policy/ any 
individual may apply to the chair of the Technical Committee for 
extra-ATC status.

Now should anyone elect to do this, I would hope they would have 
conversed with the PTL of their applicable project prior to applying to 
the TC chair.

Also the governance repo, in which the extra-ATCs are recorded, is 
tagged in advance of each election so that any questions about the 
composition of the electoral roll have a common reference point. Should 
an individual elect to apply directly to the TC chair for extra-ATC 
consideration I would highly suggest they do so well in advance of any 
tagging cadence.

To be honest, I suspect any PTL would welcome assistance composing, 
verifying and submitting the list of extra-ATCs to the governance repo. 
People might consider offering to help here.

Thanks,
Anita.