Dear GSOC students,
Many of you have become active in our community during the last three months. You have done this to learn more about the Plone Software stack and our development process, so that you can prepare your application for one of our GSOC 2023 Proposals.
Please be aware that becoming an active member of the community and participating in the current development activity is not a requirement and also will not influence or increase your chance to be selected for one of the proposals. The mentors in our community will evaluate the proposals and judge their quality and viability alone.
Getting to know Plone a bit is essential for writing a good application/proposal, but you have to realise that we are a volunteer organisation and we cannot support every one of you with every question that you might have about Plone or the proposals. Community members have day jobs and provide their limited free time to Plone.
Part of our development process is that we need Contributor Agreements from every person who wants to help us with code, documentation or other contributions, before we can merge it. Applying for, and getting your contributor agreement accepted, does however not mean that you should start using that 'permission' and start editing existing issues and PLIP's (Plone Improvement Proposals). Or create PR's (Pull requests) with your implementation without consulting first with other Developers. They have already been working on Plone for many years. The first solutions that come to your mind after evaluating our code for a week is often not the best solution. We need consensus on many decisions, which takes time, effort, skill and communication between members.
The last few weeks a minority of students who have been granted Developer team membership on GitHub have started abusing the permissions they received on our repositories, have edited existing comments, PLIP's, and already created PR's. This is likely not because of bad intentions, but you have to realise we are a volunteer organisation, we cannot handle this amount of input.
Receiving 'Developer' access to our code base and repositories on GitHub is based on the implicit trust that you treat other Developers and GSOC mentors with respect, both in text and communication. And also respect their limited time that they make available to our project and cause. If you don't receive an answer from a Team Lead, other developer or Release Manager, it is considered impolite to start pinging them in comments every day for an answer. Pinging 4 or 5 other developers because you didn't get an answer is considered rude as well. Don't ask to get issues assigned to you to 'prove' that you are actively participating. It will not increase your chance of getting selected into GSOC 2023.
As the System Administration and Infrastructure team lead I have contacted a number of other senior members this morning and we have decided to move new members that have received full access recently based on their Contributor Agreement to a new 'Contributors' Team. Also we have removed them from the 'Developers' Team on GitHub for now.
As a Contributor you can create issues, and respond to issues. And your code can get merged.
If you want to help out at the moment with our development and need to create a PR, after you have discussed its merits and viability with other (Senior) Developers, fork the repo you want to work on to your personal work space. Once it is ready for merging, create a Pull request to the official repo. And be patient.
Again: we value your contributions if you desire to make them, but please focus on your application for one of our GSOC 2023 proposals. We do not require any contribution prior to be selected as a GSOC 2023 student.
With kind regards,
Fred van Dijk - Plone AI-Team team lead
This message has been discussed with and agreed upon by:
Eric Steele - Plone Community Manager
Victor Fernandez d'Alba - Volto Release Manager
Maurits van Rees - Plone Release Manager
Jens Klein - Core Plone Developer
Erico Andrei - Plone Foundation President