CFV: New OpenJDK Members Group Member: Simon Tooke

[Kim Barrett]

vote: veto

> On May 28, 2020, at 4:06 AM, Andrew Hughes <gnu.andrew at redhat.com> wrote:
> not everyone's contribution to OpenJDK takes the form of regular
> commits.

This is true, but the CFV didn't call out significant other contributions. 

> Is being a committer not enough to be considered a member of the
> community?

There is a distinction between the "Member" (capitalized) role and
being a "member" of the OpenJDK community.  This is similar to the
distinction between being a "Reviewer" (capitalized) and a "reviewer".

> I'm a little concerned that the barrier is being set too high
> here and, given the main purpose to being an OpenJDK member is to gain
> voting rights, we risk disenfranchising a significant proportion of
> those working on OpenJDK. Looking through other recent membership votes,
> there are some that seem to have taken place relatively late, unless we
> expect all members to have hundreds of changesets.

It's a valid concern that valuable members (lowercase) of the
community might be disenfranchised because monitoring for potential
Member status isn't on the top of most folks' priorities. Sometimes
someone else notices and nominates, sometimes one needs to ask.  It
might be nice to have a better answer, but I don't know of one.

> I could accept the need for a minimum status of reviewer status for
> membership, if that was clearly stated and consistently applied. As it
> stands, the initial OpenJDK members group was populated not from the
> pool of reviewers, but from those with group membership [1]. I remember
> this clearly myself, because I recall transitioning to the bylaws with
> reviewer status, but not as a member of this group. I instead had to
> find someone who was and get them to nominate me, which is perhaps why
> it has always seemed a little peculiar to me going forward.

I can’t speak to the initial process; I wasn’t around then.

But asking someone for a nomination doesn’t seem especially onerous to me,
on either side of the question.

> In short, it would be good to finally get this clarified and agree on
> clear criteria for OpenJDK members. I'll be happy to withdraw these
> votes at that time, if the criteria agreed upon is not met by Alex & Simon.

This seems relatively clear, as such things go.
https://openjdk.java.net/groups/members/
"As a rough guide, a candidate should be a Member of at least one
Group, or a Reviewer or Project Lead of at least one Project, and make
regular and significant contributions to that Group or Project for at
least one year before being nominated to be an OpenJDK Member."

Based on the information provided in the CFV, I think none of the
above criteria are met.  Hence my veto.

> Incidentally, the bylaws also still dictate automatic expiration after a
> year [2] so, in theory, none of us are OpenJDK members any more and
> can't propose anyone to become one... ;)

This was discussed and addressed by the Governing Board:
https://openjdk.java.net/groups/gb/minutes/2019-05-30