In an earlier blog Joe described his vision of "What Does It Mean To Be Open Source?". One of the key pieces in that vision is Community Participation. We have already given committer permissions to our Github repository to three of our MVPs, Peter Donker, Vicenc Masanas and Brian Dukes, and yesterday we held the "kickoff" meeting for a new Working Group, the Architecture Working Group.
I am not yet 100% convinced that we have the right name for this group, as it will probably cover more than just "Architecture", but until we come up with a different/better name we will go with "Architecture Working Group".
As Chief Architect for DNN Corp I lead/chair this group, and the initial members of the group are a balance of DNN Corp Engineering members and Community members. Attending yesterday's meeting were Bob Kruger, Joe Brinkman, Cathal Connolly and myself from DNN Corp, the aforementioned committers Peter Donker, Vicenc Masanas and Brian Dukes from the community as well as Erik van Ballegoij. MVP Oliver Hine is also a member of the group, but was unable to attend yesterday's initial meeting.
We spent some time discussing our mandate, which broadly breaks down into two areas:
- Managing Pull Requests
- Guiding the direction of future versions of the Platform (the roadmap)
In particular we focused our attention on the first broad area - Managing Pull Requests - as the new committers were looking for some guidance on how to proceed. Whereas, Pull Requests used to be reviewed by Shaun, Cathal and myself - all DNN Corp employees, this would now be extended to include the committers. We discussed how formal the process should be - what would be the minimum requirements for a Pull Request to be included, how flexible we should be in handling Pull Requests that don't meet the minimum requirements, and how we should handle Pull Requests that needed to be rejected.
We also discussed the topic of "Code Reviews". Obviously a Pull Request will be "reviewed" by at least one committer before being committed to the repository, but we also discussed committers reviewing other committers changes. A second pair of eyes can often catch something that the original creator of the code overlooked.
We decided that given the amount of work we should meet biweekly. In terms of action items the only decisions that were made were to investigate a smoother process for new contributors to "sign" a "Contributor License Agreement", and to be open in our deliberations - hence this blog.