Create a mandatory committer training programme

Perhaps one our open source projects' biggest challenges is that committers often don’t understand their obligations to the open source community, their adopters and users, the EDP, and IP Policy. We have observed a disconnect between those who decide to bring a project to the Eclipse Foundation, those who work with us to propose and create a new Eclipse open source project, and those who actually have to do the work (that is, the committers).

We do have a number of Committer Training Videos that explain various aspects of life as a committer. These videos are readily available and we provide numerous pointers to them, but they have relative few views which means that committers either cannot find them, or don’t bother to look.

To at least some degree, we believe committers don’t think that the obligations are real.

We can look for other opportunities to provide pointers to these videos and reinforce that we are serious about the underlying principles that the practices described in the videos support. We may be able to generate a few more hits on the videos if we include, for example, more mentions in the committer and contributor agreement workflows.

We’ll get a bigger hit if we make committer training a requirement. That is, we make it a requirement (blocker) that committers must successfully complete training as part of onboarding. Further, we make it a requirement (blocker) that committers engage in some form of refresher training.

Training should focus on reminding committers of their obligations (EDP, IP Policy, Security Policy) without getting bogged down in too much detail. We should, of course, provide pointers to sources of more information.

First-Time Committer Workflow

I propose that successful completion of committer training is required before committer status will be granted. This only applies to first-time committers (somebody who already has committer status on another project, does not need to repeat first-time committer training).

This does not need to be serialised. Committer training can start as soon as an election is initiated and must be completed before committer status is granted. Committer training can start as soon as a project proposal is made public, or an initial committer is added to an already-public proposal.

It’s relatively uncommon, but possible that somebody may be elected to multiple projects simultaneously. They need only complete first-time committer training once.

Refresh Training

We depend heavily on our committers understanding their obligations as stewards of an open source project. Over time, even people operating in good faith forget things; turnover in long-standing projects may result in the loss of at least some institutional knowledge.

I would like to explore options for providing refresher training to committers. Again, I believe that this should be mandatory. Having said that, we have many long standing committers in our community who I really don't want to bother or risk insulting by suggesting that they need to attend training. Perhaps we can consider something like requiring refresh training after one year and leave the old-timers alone...

Considerations

• Keep things tight and short: target 15 minutes to complete;
• Primarily leverage video, with only one or two "skill testing" questions;
• Our goal is to ensure that committers understand their obligations to the open source community, and their adopters and users, not to test them or apply undue pressure to succeed (this is not a test, it is an opportunity to inform);
• Focus on key principles, processes, and practices, point to other resources for detail;
• To the extent possible, we should take care to mitigate the risk that the training requirement will be considered an unfair burden or punishment by longstanding committers who are already knowledgeable of our processes and engage in good faith;
• When training is required, it should be initiated automatically;
• The onboarding process can only be completed and committer status awarded after we have the necessary committer agreements in place and the nominee is in good standing with regard to committer training;
• There’s no fundamental reason why an individual cannot complete committer training prior to being nominated as a committer (and thereby enter the process already in good standing);
• Committers should be given at least several weeks notice of the requirement to complete refresher training;
• We will have to decide what we do when committers do not engage (do we automatically suspended?);
• There will be a maintenance burden: we need to regularly review and update the content.