Islandora Committers¶
Islandora is open source and released under open-source (usually MIT and GPLv2) licenses. The software, associated documentation, and community is developed collectively by a community of contributors and committers. All interested community members are encouraged to contribute to the project. Contributors who demonstrate sustained engagement with the project through quality participation in meetings, mailing lists, documentation and code updates can be self-nominated, or nominated by existing committers, to become a committer. Committers need not be limited to software developers! Contributors with skills in documentation and testing, or who are very active in the community for events and support, can also be committers.
Committers are supported in their specific work by having permissions to do things like merge code as well as manage Github, Slack, and the Website. The current list of committers is managed as a group in Github, and can be viewed in the Github repository by existing members. A separate list of committers is publicly available at the bottom of this page. If a committer does not make a contribution in a year (without known mitigating circumstances) they are usually moved out of the committers GitHub group and listed as an Emeritus committer. There are subgroups with specific enhanced access depending on their skills and levels of commitment to the codebase. These are more fully explained in this spreadsheet of keys and permissions. If you have questions about committers, you can send them to the Chair of the TAG committee, or to community@islandora.ca
Rights¶
Committers share the following rights:
- Access to key Islandora logins.
- Permissions in Islandora repositories.
- Nominating and voting on new committers.
Responsibilities¶
- Engage productively in the evolution in the community and codebase using your skills and ability.
- Have a GitHub account and maintain contact information with Islandora Foundation.
- Guide and mentor new committers
- Remain active in Islandora and/or communicate if you cannot participate further, or if your commitment level needs to change.
- Support the community through activity on community channels, including monitoring and responding to mailing list/Slack inquiries.
Committers¶
The following is an alphabetized list of the current Islandora committers:
| Name | Organization | Github username |
|---|---|---|
| Bryan Brown | Florida State University | bryjbrown |
| Joe Corall | Lehigh University | joecorall |
| Jordan Dukart | discoverygarden | jordandukart |
| Willow Gillingham | Born-Digital | wgilling |
| Jonathan Hunt | Catalyst.Net | kayakr |
| Mark Jordan | Simon Fraser University | mjordan |
| Danny Lamb | Born-Digital | dannylamb |
| Natkeeran Ledchumykanthan | University of Toronto Scarborough | natkeeran |
| Rosie Le Faive | University of Prince Edward Island | rosiel |
| Gavin Morris | Born-Digital | g7morris |
| Annie Oelschlager | Northern Illinois University | aOelschlager |
| Alexander O'Neill | Born-Digital | alxp |
| Don Richards | Johns Hopkins University | DonRichards |
| Bethany Seeger | Johns Hopkins University | bseeger |
| Seth Shaw | University of Nevada, Las Vegas | seth-shaw-unlv |
| Alan Stanley | Agile Humanities | ajstanley |
| Yamil Suarez | Berklee College of Music | ysuarez |
| Adam Vessey | discoverygarden | adam-vessey |
| Jared Whiklo | University of Manitoba | whikloj |
Emeritus Committers¶
The following is an alphabetized list of the prior Islandora committers:
| Name | Organization |
|---|---|
| Daniel Aitken | discoverygarden |
| Melissa Anez | LYRASIS |
| Aaron Coburn | Amherst College |
| Jonathan Green | LYRASIS |
| Debbie Flitner | Arizona State University |
| Diego Pino | METRO |
| Nick Ruest | York University |
| Eli Zoller | Arizona State University |
How are you evaluated as a potential committer?¶
When you are nominated, the other committers review these categories before recommending you as a committer. Note that appointment to committers/TAG is governed by the TAG Terms of reference, and appointment to TAG comes with additional rights and responsibilities. If you become a committer and a member of committers/code, you are eligible to serve in TAG.
You are committed to the Islandora Community¶
You’ve been making strong and consistent community contributions, you can stick it out through tough issues and have demonstrated a willingness to lend a hand.
You have skills and abilities suited to the role¶
You demonstrate that you understand the project and community and have skills suited to being a committer. Perhaps you have participated in multiple event planning sessions, you write a lot of documentation, or you chair an effective interest group. If you are a software developer, you’ve written good code. If your patches are easy to apply, this could be you!
You are a great colleague¶
You respond to and deliver criticism well, and do what you say you will do. You participate actively in decision-making processes, keeping the larger good of the Islandora codebase and community in your purview. You have a helpful attitude and respect everybody’s ideas.
You mentor the less experienced¶
You’ve demonstrated a willingness to reach out to less experienced community members, and link them to resources they need (maybe you made some of these resources - that’s great!)
Committers acting as Maintainers¶
If you are maintaining a specific Islandora repository, you commit to the following responsibilities for as long as you act as maintainer:
- To oversee contributions to the code, including facilitating the testing and merging of pull requests and the resolution of issues.
- To ensure the timely resolution of security fixes, including (but not limited to) monitoring dependabot security alerts.
- To ensure the documentation is correct and is updated as needed.
- To ensure appropriate backwards compatibility and to manage releases in accordance with the Islandora versioning approach.
A great maintainer also communicates important changes within the component to the community.
As maintainer, you are empowered to:
- Merge your own pull requests or those you contributed code to (subject to the usual restrictions of waiting for and addressing feedback, tests passing, etc). Other Committers are still encouraged to create, review, and merge pull requests. This is a special privilege to prevent code from stagnating. You are still responsible for the quality of the code committed and for ensuring that releases are fully tested and do not break backward compatibility.
If these responsibilities are not being performed, and/or you choose to step down as maintainer, the TAG will attempt to find another maintainer. If no maintainer can be found, and the TAG/Committers do not elect to jointly maintain the component, it may be deprecated.
Process for inducting new Committers¶
Contributors can be self-nominated or be nominated by others. These nominations can go to any committer willing to shepherd the process, or be sent to community@islandora.ca to be forwarded by IF staff. Whoever initiates the process is the sponsor and responsible for either completing the following steps, or delegating them to IF staff.
Upon receiving a nomination:
- An email is sent by sponsor or designate describing the nomination and calling for a vote to islandora-committers@googlegroups.com. (templates/committerVote.txt).
- The sponsor or designate closes the vote (templates/closeCommitterVote.txt).
- The sponsor or designate invites the new committer (templates/committerInvite.txt), if no CLA is on file (templates/committerInviteCLA.txt).
Checklist for a new committer (can be completed by sponsor or designate):
- Complete the CLA form. Ensure the entry shows up on our public sheet linked on our Contributer License Agreements wiki page.
- Add to the Islandora Committer team of the Github Islandora organization.
- Assign to the appropriate GitHub teams, ensuring updates are reflected in the community wiki documentation.
- Add to the Committer team of GitHub Islandora-Labs organization.
- Add to islandora-committers google group. Announce the new committer (template/committerAnnounce.txt).
For additional information about committers, visit this Islandora community wiki page.