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How to become a committer

There is no strict protocol for becoming a committer. Candidates for new committers are typically people that are active contributors and community members. Candidates are suggested by current committers or PPMC members, and voted upon by the PPMC.

If you would like to become a committer, you should engage with the community and start contributing to Apache Fluss in any of the ways described in the How to Contribute guides. You might also want to talk to other committers and ask for their advice and guidance.

  • Community contributions include helping to answer user questions on the mailing lists, verifying release candidates (see Verifying a Fluss Release), giving talks, organizing community events, contributing to documentation, and other forms of evangelism and community building. The "Apache Way" has a strong focus on the project community, and committers can be recognized for outstanding community contributions even without any code contributions.

  • Code/technology contributions include contributed pull requests (see Contribute Code for the process), design discussions, reviews, testing, and other help in identifying and fixing bugs. Especially constructive and high quality design discussions, as well as helping other contributors, are strong indicators.

Identify promising candidates​

While the prior points give ways to identify promising candidates, the following are "must haves" for any committer candidate:

  • Being community minded: The candidate understands the meritocratic principles of community management. They do not always optimize for as much personal contribution as possible, but will help and empower others where it makes sense.

  • Responsibility with write access: We trust that a committer candidate will use their write access to the repositories responsibly, and if in doubt, conservatively. It is important that committers are aware of what they know and what they don't know. In doubt, committers should ask for a second pair of eyes rather than commit to parts that they are not well familiar with.

  • Respectful and constructive: They have shown themselves to be respectful towards other community members and constructive in discussions.

Path to PPMC Membership​

The Project Management Committee (PPMC) is the official controlling body of the project. PPMC members “must” be able to perform the official responsibilities of the PPMC (verify releases and growth of committers/PPMC). We “want” them to be people that have a vision for Fluss, technology and community wise.

For the avoidance of doubt, not every PPMC member needs to know all details of how exactly Fluss’s release process works (it is okay to understand the gist and how to find the details). Likewise, not every PPMC member needs to be a visionary. We strive to build a PPMC that covers all parts well, understanding that each member brings different strengths.

Ideally, we find candidates among active community members that have shown initiative to shape the direction of Fluss (technology and community) and have shown willingness to learn the official processes, such as how to create or verify for releases.

For more details on PPMC roles and responsibilities, see Fluss Team.

Committer Rights​

JetBrains provides a free license to Apache Committers, allowing them to access all JetBrains IDEs, such as IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, and other desktop tools.

Please use your @apache.org email address to apply for All Products Packs for Apache committers.