Fwd: Why are committers accounts never terminated?

[Pierre Smits <pi...@gmail.com>]

FYI

Bounced again.

---------- Doorgestuurde bericht ----------
Van: *Pierre Smits* <pi...@gmail.com>
Datum: donderdag 12 maart 2015
Onderwerp: Why are committers accounts never terminated?
Aan: "dev@community.apache.org" <de...@community.apache.org>, "
infrastructure@apache.org" <in...@apache.org>


I can imagine that having a high number of committers in lists might be
regarded as beneficial for the projects, as it is reflected in 3rd party
reports and e.g. wikipedia and Openhub comparison pages.

But not doing the due process regarding offboarding sends a wrong message
to both inside and outside the community. It might lull a PMC into
complacency and jeopardizing the health of the project.

Best regards,



Pierre Smits

*ORRTIZ.COM <http://ORRTIZ.COM>*
Services & Solutions for Cloud-
Based Manufacturing, Professional
Services and Retail & Trade
http://www.orrtiz.com

On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 5:59 PM, Jacques Le Roux <
jacques.le.roux@les7arts.com
<javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','jacques.le.roux@les7arts.com');>> wrote:

> Le 12/03/2015 17:33, Leif Hedstrom a écrit :
>
>> On Mar 12, 2015, at 9:13 AM, Emmanuel Lécharny <elecharny@gmail.com
>>> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','elecharny@gmail.com');>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Le 12/03/15 15:16, Leif Hedstrom a écrit :
>>>
>>>> I'm with Pierre on this one. The ATS PMC has, as an example, several
>>>> members and committers   who no longer read or reply to emails. We honestly
>>>> have no idea if they are even in control of their  accounts.
>>>>
>>> What we do at Directory from time to time is that we periodically send a
>>> mail to the committers who have not been active for, say, the last 2
>>> years, in which we ask them if they don't mind moving to an emeritus
>>> status - which btw is nothing but updating the web page to list them as
>>> emeritus.
>>>
>>
>> So I did exactly this too, including sending several reminders to every
>> email address I could think of, for a handful of PMC members that were
>> completely MIA. This got me flogged for not following the Apache Way :-).
>> So I stopped doing it.
>>
>> What you suggest is the right way to deal with this IMO. If someone can’t
>> even be bothered sending a reply saying “Yeah, please keep me on the roster
>> for now”, there’s a serious issue. And there were no giant hurdles IMO, I
>> explicitly said “Please reply with a yes or no, and if you ever want to
>> come back as committer / PMC, all you have to do is send an email to let us
>> know”.
>>
>> As Joe points out, the security implications are small. Another problem
>> is that with enough rot in the PMC / committer ranks, reaching quorum
>> and/or majority votes can become an issue. Note, this has not been an issue
>> in the ATS PMC, at least not yet. I also feel that the PMC rot gives the
>> board and foundation a skewed view of reality; we have 40 PMC members, but
>> at least 15%-20% of those are completely gone, and are not participating in
>> any way. I don’t even know if they receive emails sent to private@.
>>
>
> Actually when I asked about the security issue I forgot to tell about
> that. That's why we used the concept of inactive PMC/Committer at OFBiz. We
> wants to get rid of it now that we invited more contributors on board :)
>
> Jacques
>
>
>
>> My $0.01,
>>
>> — Leif
>>
>> P.s
>> Not sure when / where dev@community was lost in the Cc:, I’m not adding
>> it back here since that would be inappropriate. I do feel that this is
>> probably an issue that should be resolved globally, or at least have a
>> guideline that allows (or disallows) these decisions to be made by the PMC.
>>
>>



-- 
Pierre Smits

*ORRTIZ.COM <http://www.orrtiz.com>*
Services & Solutions for Cloud-
Based Manufacturing, Professional
Services and Retail & Trade
http://www.orrtiz.com