[development] Drupal development maintenance teams

[Greg Knaddison]

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