add project contributor role to contributor ladder

[hone]

Based on discussions from the community WG, I'm proposing adding a project contributor role to the contributor ladder mirror other CNCF projects. This provides a path: Contributor -> Maintainer/Community Manager.

I have some open questions:

• Where should we list contributors? For now I put it in MAINTAINERS.md, but this feels wrong b/c Project Contributors aren't maintainers. Importantly, they shouldn't be included in the CNCF maintainers list. Should we rename MAINTAINERS.md to something like TEAM.md or create a new file?
• In the MAINTAINERS.md table, there's a Responsibilities column, for Project Contributors what would that be?
• For admitting a new Project Contributor to match what we did with maintainers: majority to accept and super majority (2/3rds) to remove. I wasn't sure if you just wanted majority for both since the impact is lower.
• There was mention of adding a reviewing role to the ladder, but I don't know if we need that much structure yet.

[nimbinatus]

I think this makes sense. I have a couple thoughts on changes, but I won't make suggestions just yet as I want to respond to your questions.

• Where should we list contributors? For now I put it in MAINTAINERS.md, but this feels wrong b/c Project Contributors aren't maintainers. Importantly, they shouldn't be included in the CNCF maintainers list. Should we rename MAINTAINERS.md to something like TEAM.md or create a new file?

I've usually found this kind of role (typically something more like "member") to be defined by org membership, tbh. Examples:

• https://github.com/argoproj/argoproj/blob/main/community/membership.md
• https://github.com/openkruise/community/blob/master/community-membership.md
• https://github.com/volcano-sh/community/blob/master/community-membership.md
• https://github.com/crossplane/crossplane/blob/main/GOVERNANCE.md#organization-members
• and, of course, https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/main/community-membership.md

• In the MAINTAINERS.md table, there's a Responsibilities column, for Project Contributors what would that be?

Based on examples like the above, I'd just say "active contributions" as use the inactive categorization you've already laid out as the definition.

• For admitting a new Project Contributor to match what we did with maintainers: majority to accept and super majority (2/3rds) to remove. I wasn't sure if you just wanted majority for both since the impact is lower.

Personally, I like the lightweight option of (1) open an issue here with details on your contributions (i.e., how do you meet the activity criteria), (2) get two plus-ones from reviewer+ (so maintainer here) from any subproject, then (3) get added to the org with the person doing the work welcoming you to the org and closing the issue as completed. I'm open to suggestions, though.

• There was mention of adding a reviewing role to the ladder, but I don't know if we need that much structure yet.
  Probably not, especially if contributors can help review with Triage access.

Probably not? But something we'll likely want in the future...

[nimbinatus]

Adding the maintainers for review.

[nimbinatus]

Following my prior comment, here's the suggestions I'd make.

[cgwalters]

This is a pretty low permission level. I'd personally like to add a finer grain here in the future; like one thing I can imagine here is for "low risk PRs" a project contributor could approve/merge too e.g.

[cgwalters]

(Nonblocking for here, just brainstorming)

[hone]

How do you determine if something is "low risk"? Is it just a "trust" thing?

[cgwalters]

I'm kind of just making things up here but I think it's a combination of basic things like CODEOWNERS plus LLM risk analysis

[cgwalters]

Or to say it a different way, I would personally like to also require "large" PRs to be reviewed by two maintainers say (or at least 1 maintainer and 1 contributor) etc.

[hone]

are you thinking we should elevate the level of permissions or do that in another round of edits? I can create an issue if we want to track this.

[jmarrero]

My vote is that we merge as is (with @nimbinatus suggested changes) and keep iterating as we need. There is nothing in this doc that seems problematic to me and the contributor permission level starting at triage is fine for now. I do think we need to expand into a larger ladder eventually with reviewer maybe like in #42. But I would like to get a couple contributors officially onboard and we can keep iterating later. I saw we leave the MANTAINERS.md alone for now and just add new CONTRIBUTORS.md one or just reflect it with the github permissions until we get a more mature contribution ladder.

[hone]

I saw we leave the MANTAINERS.md alone for now and just add new CONTRIBUTORS.md one or just reflect it with the github permissions until we get a more mature contribution ladder.

At the moment we start adding multiple markdown files, I wonder if there should just be a TEAMS.md that splits by role. I'll go with @nimbinatus's suggestion of just adding people to the GitHub org for now.

[hone]

I believe I've addressed all the feedback, if a maintainer wants to call a gitvote or provide more feedback.