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Trusted Committer

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Many InnerSource projects will find themselves in a situation where they consistently receive feedback, features, and bug-fixes from contributors. In these situations project maintainers seek ways to recognize and reward the work of the contributor above and beyond single contributions.

Problem

  • Project maintainers want to find ways to scale their ability to support a project
  • Project maintainers want to find ways to lengthen the value delivered by a project
  • Project maintainers want to visibly reward frequent contributors and empower them to amplify their value contribution.
  • Lack of language for recognizing contributions across teams within an organization

Context

  • You are the maintainer of a cross-team library, service, or shared resource
  • You receive regular contributions
  • There are motivated contributors looking to build expertise through InnerSource projects

Forces

  • Over the lifecycle of a project the focus of the maintainers may shift away to accommodate changing business priorities
  • Contributors seek visible artifacts of their contributions demonstrating value
  • Maintaining a project of reasonable complexity is taxing for a small team

Solution

Defining the Trusted Committer Role for a Project

What a Trusted Committer handles is up to each project and its maintainers. Whatever shape your Trusted Committer role takes, make sure it's clearly documented somewhere in your project. This sets expectations for new community members and outlines the role for future candidates.

Below we've provided a few guidelines for what Trusted Committers can be invited to do:

  • If a candidate participates often in community channels (e.g. Slack, JIRA issue triaging, etc.) then becoming a Trusted Committer formalizes their role in community support.
  • A good candidate for a Trusted Committer, is someone who frequently submits code, documentation, or other repository changes. Start by including this person on pull requests. If they are actively engaging in pull requests, consider approaching them about opportunities for further collaboration on the project.

Formalizing Trusted Committers

The first step is to approach candidates about becoming a Trusted Committer. Maintainers should make sure candidates understand the role. To be clear: there is no expectation that candidates will accept the role. Each candidate should figure out if they have the bandwidth to get involved.

When a candidate accepts the role it is up to the project maintainers to publicly recognize the transition from user to Trusted Committer. It is also a good idea to add their name to a Trusted Committers section in your project's README. As an example:

# project-name

... your project's readme ...

## Project Leaders

### Maintainers

  - Your team

### [Trusted Committers]

  - The name of the new trusted committer

[Trusted Committers]: https://example.com/link/to/your/trusted/committer/documentation.md

Maintaining Trusted Committer Relationships

When a new Trusted Committer is minted it’s a good idea to keep them in the loop as you continue to iterate on your project. This can be as simple as inviting them to your project channel or as involved as including them in your planning sessions. More opportunities for involvement gives Trusted Committers a path to Maintainer if they so desire.

Besides keeping Trusted Committers informed it’s a good idea to check in on a regular basis. A good cadence is every week, but as the Trusted Committer settles in this can drop to every few weeks or so. The purpose of these check-ins is to make sure the Trusted Committer feels supported in their new role, like a 1:1 with your manager. If things aren’t going well, listen and try to understand what is preventing the Trusted Committer from being successful. If things are going well, thank the Trusted Committer for their continued effort in making the project successful and set a new date to check-in.

Sunsetting a Trusted Committer

There comes a time when removal of a Trusted Committer is necessary, for example:

  • No longer willing to take part
  • No longer able to perform their duties
  • No longer employed by the company

In each of the above cases a plan for removing access to project resources should be agreed upon by both parties. This includes transitioning their entry in a project's Trusted Committer section to a list of past contributors.

After access is removed it is courteous to thank the Trusted Committer for their participation in a public way. This ensures clear communication and continuity within the community.

Resulting Context

For Contributors

Achieving Trusted Committer status for a project is a sign that the contributor has demonstrated an improvement to a community project. Recognition for these efforts can be used during annual reviews with managers.

For Maintainers

As a project matures, maintainers can become less familiar with key aspects of a project. Trusted Committers fill in these gaps. This ensures that all aspects of the project are better served over time.

A healthy set of Trusted Committers ensures that if project maintainers move on there is a plan for responsible stewardship.

Known Instances

This has been tried and proven successful at:

  • Nike
  • PayPal

Status

  • Structured
  • Published internally at Nike; drafted via pull-request in June of 2018.

Authors

Acknowledgements

Variants