On Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 12:37 PM, Ralph Goers <ralph.go...@dslextreme.com> wrote:
> > > > On Apr 16, 2018, at 10:46 AM, Maxime Beauchemin < > maximebeauche...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > About PMs, or other "non-coding contributors", it's pretty common to have > > them at sponsoring organizations. For example both Airbnb and Lyft both > > have a dedicated PM for Apache Superset. While they don't write code, > they > > contribute to the project and many other ways (prioritization / planning > / > > road-mapping, shaping product design, communication, training, > > documentation, bug reports, issue triaging, organizing events, ...). It > > sounds like the solution is to make them committers to provide them with > > the level of control they need on Github. > > I have a problem with the way this is phrased. Companies do not do the > prioritization, planning, road-mapping, shaping product-design, etc of ASF > projects. The committers and PMC members do that. The phrasing is problematic, clearly. But managers at companies *do* have an outsized influence because they can divert a substantial amount of people-power to particular issues. As such, the priority setting, road mapping and triaging that they are doing is done to keep the corporation's efforts coherent. Keeping these efforts coherent is actually a community service, as I see it. Doing these efforts off-list is a disservice, however, and is a common anti-pattern in communities. Overall, I think that it is great if somebody takes a strong and public position to help organize efforts of the community and I think that efforts like that should be recognized. At the same time, I am strenuously of the opinion that doing the same thing off-list is something that should not be recognized. The difference is probably not clear to most corporate overlords.
