Module Owners and Peers Emeritus

[Gervase Markham]

Hi everyone,

We have now implemented the idea of Owners Emeritus and Peers Emeritus
for Mozilla modules. ("Emeritus" is a Latin word which is used in
English to indicate people who no longer do a job, but are marked as
having done the job in the past. It's an honourary position.)

We have implemented this in a fairly simple way - the module description
template used on the Modules pages on the wiki now has the option to
specify lists of owners emeritus (key: "ownersemeritus") and peers
emeritus (key: "peersemeritus"), and these will then show up in the
module description. See the example here:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Template:Module

For verifiability and as a cross-check, only existing owners or
already-listed emeritus owners should change these two lists. People
should not add themselves.

For owners emeritus, you may want to put the range of dates during which
they were the owner; that is optional. It is probably better not to put
contact information (mailto: link or Mozillians link) as you would with
active owners and peers, to prevent owners emeritus and peers emeritus
being bothered by people who don't understand the distinction.

We hope this simple system will work OK; please report any problems with
it to me.

Module owners should feel free, either on their own initiative or when
prompted by such a person, to add the previous owners and/or peers of
their modules to the relevant module template. Remember that this is a
factual status and is not conditional on performance. I've opened a pull
request to add documentation for these new statuses to the Mozilla website:

https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/pull/3699/files

Gerv

[Andrew McCreight]

On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 4:27 AM, Gervase Markham <ge...@mozilla.org> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> We have now implemented the idea of Owners Emeritus and Peers Emeritus
> for Mozilla modules. ("Emeritus" is a Latin word which is used in
> English to indicate people who no longer do a job, but are marked as
> having done the job in the past. It's an honourary position.)
>

This is sort of an edge case, but what about when a module is newer than
the code is represents? The specific example I am thinking of is the cycle
collector, which has only been a module for the last few years, but the
code has been around since 2007 or so, when Graydon Hoare landed the
initial version.

I suppose technically a module owner can name anybody an emeritus peer by
synthesizing it out of existing module owner operations (name person as
peer, remove them as peer, add them as emeritus peer), so maybe that's
sufficient for giving people in this particular situation some recognition.

Andrew

>
> We have implemented this in a fairly simple way - the module description
> template used on the Modules pages on the wiki now has the option to
> specify lists of owners emeritus (key: "ownersemeritus") and peers
> emeritus (key: "peersemeritus"), and these will then show up in the
> module description. See the example here:
>
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Template:Module
>
> For verifiability and as a cross-check, only existing owners or
> already-listed emeritus owners should change these two lists. People
> should not add themselves.
>
> For owners emeritus, you may want to put the range of dates during which
> they were the owner; that is optional. It is probably better not to put
> contact information (mailto: link or Mozillians link) as you would with
> active owners and peers, to prevent owners emeritus and peers emeritus
> being bothered by people who don't understand the distinction.
>
> We hope this simple system will work OK; please report any problems with
> it to me.
>
> Module owners should feel free, either on their own initiative or when
> prompted by such a person, to add the previous owners and/or peers of
> their modules to the relevant module template. Remember that this is a
> factual status and is not conditional on performance. I've opened a pull
> request to add documentation for these new statuses to the Mozilla website:
>
> https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/pull/3699/files
>
> Gerv

> _______________________________________________
> governance mailing list
> gover...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
>

[Gervase Markham]

On 31/12/15 18:51, Andrew McCreight wrote:
> I suppose technically a module owner can name anybody an emeritus peer by
> synthesizing it out of existing module owner operations (name person as
> peer, remove them as peer, add them as emeritus peer), so maybe that's
> sufficient for giving people in this particular situation some recognition.

I'd say that's a good fix. It seems anachronistic to make people
emeritus module owners for time when there wasn't a module (let's create
one earlier next time!) but making them an emeritus peer gives them that
"we appreciate your prior contributions" fistbump.

Gerv

[Majken Connor]

I'm not so sure. This is really a question of what's the purpose of this
module, and of the module system at all!

My first question would be why use this as a mode of recognition for people
who weren't in modules? Do other recognition tools not exist? Are they
lacking? Which method should be improved to cover this use case?

As discussed above, this module isn't meant to recognize people for good
work, only to acknowledge people who have been in the role.

I don't imagine it's always been policy that anyone who contributed good
code became a peer or owner of a module. I think that if we want to do
this, we shouldn't treat it as the edge case. If we want to say that anyone
who met this standard should have (had) x role on the module, then let's
say that, and then make sure we have processes in place that review this
and ensure it happens.

On Tue, Jan 5, 2016 at 8:44 AM, Gervase Markham <ge...@mozilla.org> wrote:

> On 31/12/15 18:51, Andrew McCreight wrote:

> > I suppose technically a module owner can name anybody an emeritus peer by
> > synthesizing it out of existing module owner operations (name person as
> > peer, remove them as peer, add them as emeritus peer), so maybe that's
> > sufficient for giving people in this particular situation some
> recognition.
>

> I'd say that's a good fix. It seems anachronistic to make people
> emeritus module owners for time when there wasn't a module (let's create
> one earlier next time!) but making them an emeritus peer gives them that
> "we appreciate your prior contributions" fistbump.
>

[Benjamin Kerensa]

I think we know that recognition is lacking this was something CBT at one
point was trying to fix but since CBT was disbanded it seems recognition
was dropped also as something to solve.

I think having a emeritus role doesn't make sense and think it will be one
more thing that someone has to keep updated.

As it is now there appears to be periods of time where module owners and
peers are no longer involved in a module and it takes time to replace them.
Example is the Thunderbird module has folks who are not involved anymore
and were formerly paid by Mozilla to work on that area and now that work is
done by volunteers.

If we can't even keep current module owners and peers updated in a orderly
fashion why add a emeritus role that will likely not be consistently
updated?

On Tue, Jan 5, 2016 at 1:39 PM Majken Connor <maj...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm not so sure. This is really a question of what's the purpose of this
> module, and of the module system at all!
>
> My first question would be why use this as a mode of recognition for people
> who weren't in modules? Do other recognition tools not exist? Are they
> lacking? Which method should be improved to cover this use case?
>
> As discussed above, this module isn't meant to recognize people for good
> work, only to acknowledge people who have been in the role.
>
> I don't imagine it's always been policy that anyone who contributed good
> code became a peer or owner of a module. I think that if we want to do
> this, we shouldn't treat it as the edge case. If we want to say that anyone
> who met this standard should have (had) x role on the module, then let's
> say that, and then make sure we have processes in place that review this
> and ensure it happens.
>
> On Tue, Jan 5, 2016 at 8:44 AM, Gervase Markham <ge...@mozilla.org> wrote:
>
> > On 31/12/15 18:51, Andrew McCreight wrote:

> > > I suppose technically a module owner can name anybody an emeritus peer
> by
> > > synthesizing it out of existing module owner operations (name person as
> > > peer, remove them as peer, add them as emeritus peer), so maybe that's
> > > sufficient for giving people in this particular situation some
> > recognition.
> >

> > I'd say that's a good fix. It seems anachronistic to make people
> > emeritus module owners for time when there wasn't a module (let's create
> > one earlier next time!) but making them an emeritus peer gives them that
> > "we appreciate your prior contributions" fistbump.
> >

[Johnny Stenback]

I think it's reasonable to leave enough flexibility in this system for
current owners, or even previous owners, to reflect defacto owners in
cases like the one Andrew describes. Noone will argue that Graydon,
who wrote the cycle collector, wasn't the module owner at the time. We
just hadn't made the module official at that point, and that's fairly
normal mode of execution in practise per my memory. Whether this is
necessary from the recognition point we could argue about, but IMO
there's value in documenting previous owners whether they were
official or not.

- jst

On Tue, Jan 5, 2016 at 1:39 PM, Majken Connor <maj...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not so sure. This is really a question of what's the purpose of this
> module, and of the module system at all!
>
> My first question would be why use this as a mode of recognition for people
> who weren't in modules? Do other recognition tools not exist? Are they
> lacking? Which method should be improved to cover this use case?
>
> As discussed above, this module isn't meant to recognize people for good
> work, only to acknowledge people who have been in the role.
>
> I don't imagine it's always been policy that anyone who contributed good
> code became a peer or owner of a module. I think that if we want to do
> this, we shouldn't treat it as the edge case. If we want to say that anyone
> who met this standard should have (had) x role on the module, then let's
> say that, and then make sure we have processes in place that review this
> and ensure it happens.
>
> On Tue, Jan 5, 2016 at 8:44 AM, Gervase Markham <ge...@mozilla.org> wrote:
>
>> On 31/12/15 18:51, Andrew McCreight wrote:

>> > I suppose technically a module owner can name anybody an emeritus peer by
>> > synthesizing it out of existing module owner operations (name person as
>> > peer, remove them as peer, add them as emeritus peer), so maybe that's
>> > sufficient for giving people in this particular situation some
>> recognition.
>>

>> I'd say that's a good fix. It seems anachronistic to make people
>> emeritus module owners for time when there wasn't a module (let's create
>> one earlier next time!) but making them an emeritus peer gives them that
>> "we appreciate your prior contributions" fistbump.
>>

[Gervase Markham]

Hi Majken,

On 05/01/16 21:39, Majken Connor wrote:
> I'm not so sure. This is really a question of what's the purpose of this
> module, and of the module system at all!

The purpose of the module system is to be the core of the governance of
the Mozilla project. (Whether it adequately fulfils that purpose and how
we fix it is out of scope for today :-) The purpose of this proposal (I
think that, even though Mitchell started by calling it a 'module', it's
now no longer a module in itself and it's confusing to call it one) is
to provide longer-term area-specific recognition for people who have had
leadership positions.

> My first question would be why use this as a mode of recognition for people
> who weren't in modules? Do other recognition tools not exist? Are they
> lacking? Which method should be improved to cover this use case?

The current major project-wide recognition tool is about:credits but (by
design) it's just a list of names. This new form of recognition shows
that people had authority within the project, and connects that to the
area concerned.

> I don't imagine it's always been policy that anyone who contributed good
> code became a peer or owner of a module.

Indeed not; I'd say that's specifically not a goal of the module system.
Being an owner certainly is (and being a peer to a lesser extent is) a
different set of skills to the skill of being able to contribute good code.

Gerv

[Gervase Markham]

On 05/01/16 22:20, Benjamin Kerensa wrote:
> I think having a emeritus role doesn't make sense and think it will be one
> more thing that someone has to keep updated.

There is no requirement to keep it updated; I would expect being listed
to be driven by the ex-owner themselves, who wanted to be able to cite
their involvement. There is no consistency requirement either.

Gerv