[development] Drupal development maintenance teams

[Robert Douglass]

Greg, I totally understand your sentiment about "teams". However, if  
there are "leaders" in these areas, and the teams can be ad-hoc, how  
does that feel? The important thing, to me, is empowering more of the  
exceptional people in the community become stronger leaders (by  
vesting power and responsibility in them).

Robert Douglass

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On Apr 27, 2009, at 3:03 AM, Greg Knaddison wrote:

> On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Nedjo Rogers <nedjo at islandnet.com>  
> wrote:
>> For each area, we have one or two leads--an expanded version of the
>> "maintainers" we already have designated for different areas of  
>> Drupal
>> core. These leads continue to be appointed by Dries. But instead of
>> being individually responsible for an area, these leads select and  
>> lead
>> a team of maintainers. These teams are managed a lot like the current
>> maintainers list.
>>
>> Here's an idea of how it might work. Dries appoints an lead in a  
>> given
>> area, e.g., internationalization. That lead invites individuals with
>> proven expertise and a track record to become formal members of the
>> internationalization maintenance team, responsible for all issues  
>> in the
>> "multilingual support" and locale module components. Members of this
>> team are listed on a drupal.org page along with members of the other
>> members of the team. The basic responsibility of team members is to
>> review, update, and refine patches in their given areas until they  
>> are
>> closed. They can also take a step back as needed and evaluate overall
>> progress and needs in an area, prioritizing patches to review and
>> improve or creating new ones. Patch contributors can contact team
>> members directly to discuss their patches and get help.
>
> FWIW, I really like the current (somewhat chaotic) system without
> maintainers and teams.  Teams in other projects strike me as something
> that creates a barrier to entry rather than increasing involvement. I
> like how anyone can show up and, with a few days of
> commenting/patching intelligently join a "team."
>
> The docs team is morphing and has moved to a more distributed model
> that allows anyone to maintain most of the pages in the handbook.
>
> I've heard several people say "well, I'm not on Drupal's core team so
> I can't be involved in developing patches."  Of course I correct them
> that we have no such team and they are empowered to contribute just
> like everyone, but the "team/outsider" feeling persists based on false
> perceptions of the project.
>
> I wonder if there's something that can be done to provide greater
> recognition/control for individuals in certain areas without erecting
> this kind of false barrier.  Another alternative would be to try out
> the team idea in one area - like i18n - and then re-evaluate for core
> in general based on the success of that pilot.
>
> Greg
>
> -- 
> Greg Knaddison
> http://knaddison.com | 303-800-5623 | http://growingventuresolutions.com