Re: Contributor List policy

Josh,

> Per the following emails and a discussion with Bruce Momjian on the
> phone I am suggesting a change (and documentation) of the way
> contributors will be determined and displayed on PostgreSQL.Org.

Mind laying out what you're proposing, exactly?  I can't say that I could
determine from this post what you're proposing.

I also don't see why -advocacy is the appropriate forum for this
discussion.

>   * List: sysadmins (link to subscribe form)

Um, the sysadmins list is closed an private for reasons of security.

> [2] Contributors will be determined for each team will be resolved by
> the respective teams (e.g; who is a part of the team, or leaves the
> team etc..)

Wait, wait, are you proposing that we should have contributor breakdown per
committee?  And that everyone on every committee should be listed,
regardless of how much work they actually do?

This is a bit more radical than your earlier proposals.  I can see 3 things
about it which are potential showstoppers, all of which need to be dealt
with before we could start implementing the new policy:

1) it's an enormous amount of work compared to the previous policy, like 5x
to 10x.  Who's going to do all this, exactly?

2) People who contribute a little in multiple areas of the project will get
much more exposure that people who contribute a lot in one area.  Not sure
this idea is solvable.

3) Asking the committees themselves to do an evaluation of who among them
is "good enough" to be listed is asking for a lot of political infighting
around update time, possibly with enough acrimony to make people leave the
project.

4) How do we decide which ancillary projects and organizations get linked,
and which do not?  This alone will need a lot of discussion.

Overall, I think what you're proposing is headed in the right direction,
but I also think it will take quite a while to hammer out.  Why not update
the listings according to the draft Core policy now, and then you won't be
under time pressure to fix all of these things because we're 15 months out
of date.

--
--Josh

Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco