The call for Trusted Contributors we put out in December (and part 2) has been successful beyond our wildest imagination. As of writing we now have 11 TCs, who make a huge impact regarding the amount of patches we get into postmarketOS and the issues that get answered. We have learned that a great way to scale postmarketOS up is empowering well known community members to just do what they care about in this project.
With today's blog post we want to cut some more red tape. Besides the Trusted Contributors, we have a whole lot more active community members that are either listed in CODEOWNERS or just have been very active in the issue trackers.
Permissions
We figured that it would be immensely useful if those very valued members of our community would be able to:
- Triage issues by applying labels, and being able to close them.
- Approve merge requests to packages that they maintain.
The big difference to the Trusted Contributor role is, that Active Community Members do not need to submit a formal application, and that they don't get merge rights.
How it will work
You must have 2FA enabled on your GitLab account.
If you have your name in the pmaports CODEOWNERS file and have been active on GitLab within the last three months, expect an invite to a new "postmarketOS Active Community Members" GitLab group over the coming weeks.
If you are not in CODEOWNERS, but you do help out a bunch with pmaports issue triage (which should be obvious from your GitLab activity) and would like to do this more effectively, then you can also join this group. Write a short e-mail, mentioning your gitlab nickname and that you would like to join the Active Community Maintainers.
The new Active Community Members group gets reporter permissions on the pmaports repository.
Improving the triaging process itself is currently being discussed in #60 and further feedback is appreciated. The current iteration of labels and how they are meant to be used can be found in the triaging wiki article.
Groups overview
The groups within postmarketOS are now the Core Team, Trusted Contributors, Active Community Members and the Testing Team. While it may sound like a bit much, having this organizational structure really helps to stay on top of the issue tracker and get relevant changes into postmarketOS faster. A homepage update is in the works, that will have a quick overview of all groups in a new team page.