RFC: GitHub Org Clean Up

[Bob Killen]

Hey there all,

During yesterday's meeting we discussed the clean up of inactive members from the Kubernetes GitHub Orgs. It has been discussed previously in the GitHub Admin subproject meetings, but as this impacts everyone, we wanted to seek broader consensus. 

TL;DR

- Establish policy to remove inactive members from the Kubernetes orgs if they have had NO activity across any Kubernetes org  in the past 18 months. 

- Would remove roughly 150~ members of which 35~ are in owners files

- Original issue: https://github.com/kubernetes/community/issues/3179

- Spreadsheet with member audit: https://bit.ly/k8s-member-activity

- Link to yesterday's discussion: https://youtu.be/WAVgI42x6yY?t=1362

Why perform the clean up?

Being an org member comes with a level of responsibility coupled with a greater set of GitHub permissions. We define in our community membership guidelines that:

Members are continuously active contributors in the community. They can have issues and PRs assigned to them, participate in SIGs through GitHub teams, and pre-submit tests are automatically run for their PRs. Members are expected to remain active contributors to the community.

People become inactive for a variety of reasons, work changes, life change...it's all a part of life. Being removed from the org does not stop folk from continuing to participate in our community, the org definitions is more of a day-to-day set of permissions of who can allow commits to the active codebase.

Should they become active again, the process to become an org member has been streamlined and has a very low barrier of entry. Inactive members returning should encounter very little friction coming back.

If you have any thoughts or comments on this, please reply in this thread before the next meeting (May 20th).

Thanks!

- Bob

[Tim Hockin]

Looking at the list of removals a few things stand out:
* some bots - are they really not in use any more?
* some notables like Kelsey and Steve Watt
* mostly I agree with the people whose names I know

As long as the criteria are clear (and I think they are) I do not object.

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[Bob Killen]

The bots are a false positive that should be removed from the list , they're set to be ignored from reporting in devstats but are org members.

There are a few others on the list that are active community members that don't necessarily have devstats recorded actions, but are active community members. I should have called that one out in the previous email.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/kubernetes-sig-contribex/CAO_Rewad6i4qHwx_Rhd9%3DSpsgWZ%2BGO0VOiJ%2BDd6xg86sPEsj_Q%40mail.gmail.com.

[Remy 'Sieben' Leone]

What happens in the case where there are no owners/maintainers in a
given team after a cleanup? Do we have a process in the case where a
group becomes empty and some decisions need to be made?

Does commenting on a GitHub issue count as an activity? It could help
in the case where people organize events/CNCF meetups but are not too
committed to contributing to GitHub for instance.
Having public recognition from the Kubernetes organization is
something with value. We should add options for various kinds of
contributions that cannot be accounted for on GitHub to leave a track.

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[Paris Pittman]

>What happens in the case where there are no owners/maintainers in a
given team after a cleanup? Do we have a process in the case where a
group becomes empty and some decisions need to be made?

that would be the responsibility of the next level OWNERs and Tech Leads for that area re: decisions

> Does commenting on a GitHub issue count as an activity? 

yes

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/kubernetes-sig-contribex/CAHCejjUMzWnCo7nzzQqoeStKLPXDrVmS545e%2BZsPh7nExaOg7w%40mail.gmail.com.

--

Paris Pittman Kubernetes Community Open Source Strategy, Google Cloud 345 Spear Street, San Francisco, 94105

[Bob Killen]

Replying inline for comment

On Thu, May 7, 2020 at 3:34 PM Remy 'Sieben' Leone <remy....@gmail.com> wrote:

What happens in the case where there are no owners/maintainers in a
given team after a cleanup? Do we have a process in the case where a
group becomes empty and some decisions need to be made?

It functions as if there is no OWNERS file within that directory and moves up to the next one it can find in the directory tree.

When the clean up occurs we can bubble potential empty ones back up to the owning SIG.

Does commenting on a GitHub issue count as an activity? It could help
in the case where people organize events/CNCF meetups but are not too
committed to contributing to GitHub for instance.

 

Any GitHub event (excluding pressing the approve button in the GitHub UI due to how GH emits those events) counts towards activity. Issues, PRs, comments, edits etc are included. 👍

 

Having public recognition from the Kubernetes organization is
something with value. We should add options for various kinds of
contributions that cannot be accounted for on GitHub to leave a track.

The policy can be worded to account for those members. :) We do have plenty of non-code contribution areas.