DEP 12 Steering Council eligibility criteria feedback

[thibaudcolas]

Here is my feedback on the DEP 12 eligibility rules, based on a few hours spent reviewing the profiles of 9 established contributors as part of (DSF members only) Preparing for the 6.x series Steering Council Election.

This is just my feedback on the rules as they stand, am not intending to suggest any specific way forward. I at least wanted to record this as I presume there aren’t many people who look into the points of detail to understand exactly who they might be including or excluding. I hope this will be helpful to anyone considering possible changes to the eligibility rules.

I also won’t share my own interpretation of the points as that’s a somewhat separate topic. Wanted to say thank you to @nessita @sarahboyce @glasnt who helped considering different viewpoints. I think we’ll be able to share what we arrived at, later.

Logistics of viewing the rules

It’s incredibly painful to read DEPs 12 and 10 to determine what is going on. Having to wonder in which ways exactly one supercedes the other. DEP 12 is pretty short and sweet but still the eligibility rules aren’t clearly labelled as such (it’s inside "Specification"). DEP 10 is one of the hardest bits of documentation I’ve ever had to read in the Django world.

Wording of the rules

Sharing the full text first, then line-by-line feedback.

[…] requiring both of the following:
A history of substantive contributions to Django or the Django ecosystem. This history must begin at least 18 months prior to the individual's candidacy for the Steering Council, and include substantive contributions in at least two of these bullet points:

• Code contributions on Django projects or major third-party packages in the Django ecosystem
• Reviewing pull requests and/or triaging Django project tickets
• Documentation, tutorials or blog posts
• Discussions about Django on the django-developers mailing list or the Django Forum
• Running Django-related events or user groups
  A history of engagement with the direction and future of Django. This does not need to be recent, but candidates who have not engaged in the past three years must still demonstrate an understanding of Django's changes and direction within those three years.

So, top to bottom.

[…] requiring both of the following:

Super clear.

Substantive contributions

A history of substantive contributions to Django or the Django ecosystem. > This history must begin at least 18 months prior to the individual's candidacy for the Steering Council, and include substantive contributions in at least two of these bullet points:

• "substantive" does a lot of heavy lifting here. I never use that word personally, not clear what it means. In particular it’s not clear if contributions can only be substantive individually, or whether in aggregate they can become substantive.
• It’s not clear whether the substantive contributions have to have started at least 18 months prior, or at any point.
• We could use a better term than "bullet points" here, as it makes it very hard to formally refer to said points. I can’t just tell people they "have to meet two of five bullet points" when explaining the rules.

• Code contributions on Django projects or major third-party packages in the Django ecosystem

• "Django projects" – isn’t clear which projects this is. Things built with Django as a user of the framework? Everything under the GitHub org?
• "Major third-party packages" – not clear what qualifies as "major".
• Not clear if contributing translations counts as code contributions.

• Reviewing pull requests and/or triaging Django project tickets

• Not clear to me what a "substantive" pull request review is if we only consider individual reviews. It’s also very hard to check.
• I’m not able to get data out of Trac to assess who does the different triaging contributions. It seems possible in theory but with a time investment that’s not realistic.

• Documentation, tutorials or blog posts

• I really like this one as we have a lot of avid bloggers in our community!
• Not clear if "Documentation" is the django/django docs only, or otherwise (major packages?). Not clear what’s a "substantive" blog post or tutorial.
• Feels like a natural place to also recognize conference speakers? Presumably a keynote at DjangoCon would be a substantive contribution there.

• Discussions about Django on the django-developers mailing list or the Django Forum

• This one is great too, a lot of people spend a lot of time having thoughtful discussions that directly contribute to the health of the project.
• This excludes major discussions forums such as Discord, Reddit, social media; that wouldn’t be too hard to check.

• Running Django-related events or user groups

• It’s not clear to me what qualifies as "running" an event. For example whether that includes being a volunteer for a small part of an event (say doing DjangoCon talk proposals reviews), or whether you have to be part of the leading organizers.
• It’s not clear to me whether things like Djangonaut Space or Google Summer of Code are "events" or not.

Direction and future

A history of engagement with the direction and future of Django. This does not need to be recent, but candidates who have not engaged in the past three years must still demonstrate an understanding of Django's changes and direction within those three years.

• I like the broadness of the "history of engagement with the direction and future of Django", but this could use examples so it’s not too open to interpretation.
• It’s not clear to me how people who haven’t engaged in three years would demonstrate this. For this specifically I’d suggest replacing this with a "must have engaged within the last year". Everyone’s profile I’ve reviewed so far has had recent engagement anyway.