A person can be nominated to become a MXNet committer by current PMC members as a formal recognition of their individual contributions to the project.
Acceptance Criteria
In the interest of having a transparent and objective nomination process, the following criteria will be applied when evaluating new committer nominations.
1. History of sustained contributions to the project
A factor that will be considered is the duration for which the person is associated with the project. The association can either be in form of code contributions or participation in community discussions on technical topics or project governance. A minimum of 3 months is needed before someone can be nominated to become a committer. The evidence of sustained contributions should provide an assurance to the community that the nominee will continue the contributions even after becoming a committer.
2. Quality of contributions to the project
New committers should have a history of code contributions to MXNet in the form of accepted pull requests to master branch. The substance and value of pull requests will be considered when evaluating new committer nominations. The following are some examples of contributions that will make a strong case. Having one of the following is sufficient:
- The person is the primary contributor of a feature that got mentioned as a major feature in one of the MXNet releases. Examples: Sparse tensor support, Gluon interface, New language bindings.
- The person has contributed at least 5 non-trivial bug fixes in more than one module.
- The person has a history of contributions to the project documentation featured on http://mxnet.incubator.apache.org. This includes API documentation, tutorials and how-tos.
- The person acted as a shepherd for at least one of the MXNet releases.
When it comes to code contributions, quality is more important than quantity. While all contributions are welcome and highly appreciated, certain guidelines will be applied when it comes to committer nominations, e.g. clean, documented and maintainable code, including unit tests if applicable. Updating license text or fixing indentation in hundreds of source files for instance is case of quantity trumping quality.
3. Community Involvement
Potential committers should have a record of participating in discussions related to MXNet code and features. They should have a history of providing constructive inputs on PRs and github issues. Answering user questions on forums such as stackoverflow, slack channel and apache dev@ list are also considered valuable contributions. Potential committers can demonstrate community involvement by having an additional responsibility to mentor new contributors and enhancing MXNet documentation related to APIs, architecture/design, etc.
Process
New committer nominations can be made by an existing PMC member providing reason(s) for why X should be made a committer. Contributions such as PRs and issues can be easily looked up, therefore, it is better to provide a brief summary of the contributions made with a focus on qualitative aspects.