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Of course, before becoming a committer, there are certain things you can't actually do (e.g. commit a patch to source control; cast a binding vote), but the more you participate in the activities which surround these actions, the more ready you will be to eventually carry them out yourself.
It should go without saying, but here it is anyway: your participation should be a natural part of your work with Hive; if you find yourself undertaking tasks "so that you can become a committer", then you're doing it wrong, young grasshopper.
Visualize
The graph below shows monthly patch authorship and commit activity for an actual Hive committer. The blue shows all commits going into Hive from all committers. The orange shows patches authored by this committer, whereas the green shows patches reviewed and committed by him after they were authored by others. (Not shown are reviews he participated in before becoming a committer.)
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- it took a while for him to become a committer: we'd like to make sure that all committers are truly dedicated to the role
- after becoming a committer, he began fulfilling the role by actively reviewing and committing many patches from others (even more than those he continued to author himself!), and sustained that energy over time
- we're using a narrow quantitative measure here (patch count) purely for the purpose of visualizing activity level over time; what we're really interested in are quality and value brought to the project across a wide range of activities (for example, the committer in this case also volunteered to serve as release manager for multiple releases of Hive, starting even before becoming a committer)
The Dark Side
It should go without saying, but here it is anyway: your participation should be a natural part of your work with Hive; if you find yourself undertaking tasks "so that you can become a committer", then you're doing it wrong, young grasshopper. This is particularly true if your motivations for wanting to become a committer are primarily negative or self-centered, e.g.
- you desire the power of a -1 vote (these should be used only extremely rarely in a healthy project)
- you want to push your own changes through unreviewed (Hive follows a review-before-commit policy where even committers need to wait for a +1 from another committer)
- you only want to commit changes from other contributors within a particular affiliation group (e.g. coworkers in the same corporation); the committer role is about furthering a diverse project, not a narrow agenda