Impala recognizes some contributors for their work by offering them "committership". For more on what that means, read the Apache Software Foundation's guide to new committers or Impala's bylaws, which describe the rights and responsibilities of committers.
The Impala Program Management Committee chooses to recognize as committers people who have:
- Demonstrated an ability to work well with the community. This includes receiving technical feedback and acting on it graciously, and giving high-quality technical feedback in a professional manner.
- Made a significant and sustained contribution to the project. The contribution should be significant enough that others seek out the advice of the contributor.
- Participated actively in the community.
Coding is not the only path by which a person can become a committer - contributions in bug finding and triage, testing, and documentation are all welcome and are paths by which a contributor can gain committership.
A note about technical feedback: Impala depends on committers to act as a gate ensuring that docs, bug reports, code, and releases are high quality. To become a committer, a contributor should demonstrate that they are willing and able to review these artifacts and make sure they meet Impala's quality standards. For instance, a contributor elected to committership by way of code contributions will also have provided numerous careful code reviews of patches from other contributors.