At Amundsen, we want to produce an environment of fairness that people can rely on. A formal governance structure helps us resolve debates, invite in (or out) new developers and plan new features.
With the following governance system, we want to facilitate project permanence, supporting it with healthy habits and processes that are well understood by everyone.
Amundsen is a meritocratic, consensus-based community project. Anyone interested in the project can join the community, contribute to the project design, and participate in the decision-making process. This document describes how that participation occurs and how to set about earning merit within the project community.
Users are community members who need the data discovery features of Amundsen. They are the most important community members, and without them, the project would have no purpose. Anyone can be a user; there are no special requirements.
Amundsen asks its users to participate in the project and community as much as possible. User contributions enable the project team to ensure that they satisfy the needs of those users. Frequent user contributions include (but are not limited to):
- Evangelizing about the project (e.g., a link on a website and word-of-mouth awareness raising)
- Informing developers of strengths and weaknesses from a new user perspective
- Providing moral support (a ‘thank you’ goes a long way)
- Providing financial support (the software is open source, but its developers need to eat)
Users who continue to engage with the project and its community will often become more and more involved. Such users may find themselves becoming contributors, as described in the next section.
Contributors are community members who contribute in concrete ways to the project. Anyone can become a contributor, and contributions can take many forms. There is no expectation of commitment to the project, no specific skill requirements, and no selection process.
In addition to their actions as users, contributors may also find themselves doing one or more of the following:
- Supporting new users (existing users are often the best people to help new users)
- Creating, triaging or commenting on Issues
- Doing code reviews or commenting on technical documents
- Writing, editing, translating or reviewing the documentation
- Organizing events or evangelizing the project
Contributors engage with the project through the issue tracker and slack community, or by writing or editing documentation. They submit changes to the project itself via Pull Requests (PRs), which will be considered for inclusion in the project by existing maintainers (see next section). Contributors follow the Contributing guide when creating PRs.
As contributors gain experience and familiarity with the project, their profile and commitment within the community will increase. At some stage, they may find themselves being nominated for being a maintainer.
Maintainers are community members who have shown that they are committed to Amundsen’s continued development through ongoing engagement with the community. Because of this, maintainers have the right to merge PRs and triage issues.
Note that any change to resources in Amundsen must be through pull requests. This applies to all changes to documentation, code, configuration, etc. Even maintainers must use pull requests, as they are key to provide transparency and attract new contributors to the project. Additionally, no pull request can be merged without being reviewed.
Anyone can become a maintainer. Typically, a potential maintainer will need to show that they understand the project, its objectives, and its strategy. They will also have provided valuable contributions to the project over a period of time. Read the sections below to know how to become an Amundsen maintainer.
Any existing maintainer can nominate new maintainers. Once they have been nominated, there will be a vote by the rest of the maintainers. Maintainer voting is one of the few activities that take place on a private channel. This is to allow maintainers to express their opinions about a nominee without causing embarrassment freely. The approval requires three maintainers +1 vote and no -1 vote.
Once the vote has been held, the aggregated voting results are published on the #amundsen channel. The nominee is entitled to request an explanation of any ‘no’ votes against them, regardless of the vote's outcome. This explanation will be provided by the maintainers and will be anonymous and constructive.
Nominees may decline their appointment as a maintainer. Becoming a maintainer means that they will be spending a substantial time working on Amundsen for the foreseeable future. It is essential to recognize that being a maintainer is a privilege, not a right. That privilege must be earned, and once earned, the rest of the maintainers can remove it in extreme circumstances.
There is not a single path of earning a nomination for maintainer at Amundsen, however, we can give some guidance about some actions that would help:
- Start by expressing interest to the maintainers that you are interested in becoming a maintainer.
- You can start tackling issues labeled as ‘help wanted’, or if you are new to the project, some of the ‘good first issue’ tickets.
- As you gain experience with the codebase and our standards, we will ask you to do code reviews for incoming PRs (i.e., all maintainers are expected to shoulder a proportional share of community reviews).
- We will expect you to start contributing increasingly complicated PRs, under the guidance of the existing maintainers.
- After approximately 2-3 months of working together, an existing maintainer will be able to nominate you for maintainer status.
We make no guarantees on the length of time this will take, but 2-3 months is the approximate goal.
The project maintainers are those individuals identified as ‘project owners’ on the development site. Maintainers have many responsibilities, which ensure the smooth running of the project. Among them, we can name:
- Monitor email aliases and our Slack (delayed response is perfectly acceptable).
- Perform code reviews for other maintainers and the community. The areas of specialization listed in OWNERS.md can be used to help with routing an issue/question to the right person.
- Triage GitHub issues, applying labels to each new item. Labels are extremely useful for future issue follow ups. Adding labels is somewhat subjective, so please use your best judgment. Read more about our labels on this document.
- Triage build issues, filing issues for known flaky builds or bugs, fixing or finding someone to fix any master build breakages.
- Make sure that ongoing PRs are moving forward at the right pace or closing them.
- Participate in strategic planning, approve changes to the governance model, and manage the copyrights within the project outputs.
If a maintainer is no longer interested and cannot perform the maintainer duties listed above, they could volunteer to be moved to emeritus status. The maintainer status is attributed for life otherwise. An emeritus maintainer may request reinstatement of commit access from the rest of maintainers. Such reinstatement is subject to lazy consensus approval of active maintainers.
In extreme cases, maintainers can lose their status by a vote of the maintainers per the voting process below.
Decisions about the future of Amundsen are made through discussion with all community members, from the newest user to the most experienced maintainer. All non-sensitive project management discussion takes place on the project issue tracker system. Occasionally, sensitive discussion occurs on a private channel of our Slack.
To ensure that the project is not bogged down by endless discussion and continual voting, the project operates a policy of lazy consensus. This allows the majority of decisions to be made without resorting to a formal vote.
Decision making typically involves the following steps:
- Proposal
- Discussion
- Vote (if consensus is not reached through discussion)
- Decision
Any community member can make a proposal for consideration by the community. To initiate a discussion about a new idea, they should create an issue or submit a PR implementing the idea to the issue tracker. This will prompt a review and, if necessary, a discussion of the idea. The goal of this review and discussion is to gain approval for the contribution. Since most people in the project community have a shared vision, there is often little discussion to reach consensus.
In general, as long as nobody explicitly opposes a proposal or PR, it is recognized as having the support of the community. This is called lazy consensus - that is, those who have not stated their opinion explicitly have implicitly agreed to the proposal's implementation.
Lazy consensus is a fundamental concept within the project. This process allows a large group of people to reach consensus efficiently as someone with no objections to a proposal need not spend time stating their position.
For lazy consensus to be effective, it is necessary to allow at least 48 hours before assuming that there are no objections to the proposal. This requirement ensures that everyone is given enough time to read, digest, and respond to the proposal. This time period is chosen to be as inclusive as possible of all participants, regardless of their location and time commitments.
Not all decisions can be made using lazy consensus. Issues such as those affecting the strategic direction or legal standing of the project must gain explicit approval in the form of a vote. Every member of the community is encouraged to express their opinions in all discussions and all votes. However, only project maintainers have binding votes for the purposes of decision making.
Our roadmap gives an overview of what we are currently working on and what we want to tackle next. This helps potential contributors understand your project's current status and where it's going next, as well as giving a chance to be part of the planning.
In this section, we describe the process we follow to create it, using request for comments documents (RFCs).
Most of the issues we see can be handled with regular GitHub issues. However, some changes are "substantial", and we ask that these go through a design process and produce a consensus among the Amundsen community.
The "RFC" (request for comments) process is intended to provide a consistent and controlled path for new features to enter the roadmap. The high-level process looks like this:
- Contributor creates an RFC draft in the repository
- Users, Contributors, and Maintainers discuss and upvote the draft
- If confident on its success, contributor completes the RFC with more in-detail technical specifications
- Maintainers approve RFC when it is ready
- Maintainers meet every quarter and choose three or five items based on popularity and alignment with project vision and goals
- Those selected items become part of the Mid-term goals
What constitutes a "substantial" change is evolving based on the community, but may include the following:
- New features that require configuration options to activate/deactivate
- Remove features
- Architecture changes
- Examples:
- Adding lineage features
- Dashboards integration
Some changes do not require a RFC:
- Reorganizing or refactoring code or documentation
- Improvements that tackle objective quality criteria (speedup, better browser support)
- Changes noticeable only by contributors or maintainers
- Examples:
- Adding programmatic descriptions
- Adding support for tags at a column level
If you submit a pull request to implement a new feature without going through the RFC process, it may be closed with a polite request to submit an RFC first. That said, if most of the work is done, we'd accelerate the process.
We will keep our RFC documents in a separate repo on the Amundsen-io organization, where a detailed step by step process will be documented.