community-membership.md

Community membership

Note: This document is a work in progress

This doc outlines the various responsibilities of contributor roles in Kubernetes. The Kubernetes project is subdivided into subprojects under SIGs. Responsibilities for most roles are scoped to these subprojects.

Role	Responsibilities	Requirements	Defined by
Member	Active contributor in the community	Sponsored by 2 reviewers and multiple contributions to the project	Kubernetes GitHub org member
Reviewer	Review contributions from other members	History of review and authorship in a subproject	OWNERS file reviewer entry
Approver	Contributions acceptance approval	Highly experienced active reviewer and contributor to a subproject	OWNERS file approver entry
Subproject owner	Set direction and priorities for a subproject	Demonstrated responsibility and excellent technical judgement for the subproject	sigs.yaml subproject OWNERS file owners entry

New contributors

New contributors should be welcomed to the community by existing members, helped with PR workflow, and directed to relevant documentation and communication channels.

Established community members

Established community members are expected to demonstrate their adherence to the principles in this document, familiarity with project organization, roles, policies, procedures, conventions, etc., and technical and/or writing ability. Role-specific expectations, responsibilities, and requirements are enumerated below.

Member

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.

Defined by: Member of the Kubernetes GitHub organization

Requirements

• Enabled two-factor authentication on their GitHub account
• Ensure GitHub username, company affiliation and email in CNCF gitdm are up to date. If you are not affiliated with a company please mark yourself as "Independent".
  • gitdm is primarily used by devstats to track contributions from the many companies involved in the ecosystem. Kubernetes also uses it to ensure org membership sponsors are from different member companies.
• Ensure affiliation is up to date in openprofile.dev.
  • openprofile.dev will replace gitdm in the future to track affiliation.
• Have made multiple contributions to the project or community, enough to demonstrate an ongoing and long-term commitment to the project. Contributions should include, but is not limited to:
  • Authoring or reviewing PRs on GitHub, with at least one merged PR. NOTE: The PR(s) must demonstrate an ongoing and active commitment. A few examples include:
    • A single KEP that has taken several weeks of driving consensus
    • A larger number of smaller PRs over several weeks to months
    • A smaller number of complex or technical PRs that required working with community members to resolve an issue (e.g. regressions, bugs fixes etc)
  • Filing or commenting on issues on GitHub
  • Contributing to SIG, subproject, or community discussions (e.g. meetings, Slack, email discussion forums)
• Subscribed to dev@kubernetes.io
• Have read the contributor guide
• Actively contributing to 1 or more subprojects.
• Sponsored by 2 reviewers. Note the following requirements for sponsors:
  • Sponsors must have close interactions with the prospective member - e.g. code/design/proposal review, coordinating on issues, etc.
  • Sponsors must be reviewers or approvers in at least one OWNERS file within one of the Kubernetes GitHub organizations*.
  • Sponsors must be from multiple member companies to demonstrate integration across community.
• Open an issue against the kubernetes/org repo
  • Ensure your sponsors are @mentioned on the issue
  • Complete every item on the checklist (preview the current version of the template)
  • Make sure that the list of contributions included is representative of your work on the project.
• Have your sponsoring reviewers reply confirmation of sponsorship: +1
• Once your sponsors have responded, your request will be reviewed by the Kubernetes GitHub Admin team, in accordance with their SLO. Any missing information will be requested.

* Excluding the Contributor Playground repository. It is configured to allow non-org members to be included in OWNERS files for contributor tutorials and workshops.

Kubernetes Ecosystem

There are related Kubernetes GitHub organizations, such as kubernetes-sigs. We are currently working on automation that would transfer membership in the Kubernetes organization to any related orgs automatically, but such is not the case currently. If you are a member of one of these Orgs, you are implicitly eligible for membership in related orgs, and can request membership when it becomes relevant, by creating a PR directly or opening an issue against the kubernetes/org repo, as above.

Responsibilities and privileges

• Responsive to issues and PRs assigned to them
• Responsive to mentions of SIG teams they are members of
• Active owner of code they have contributed (unless ownership is explicitly transferred)
  • Code is well tested
  • Tests consistently pass
  • Addresses bugs or issues discovered after code is accepted
• Members can do /lgtm on open PRs.
• They can be assigned to issues and PRs, and people can ask members for reviews with a /cc @username.
• Tests can be run against their PRs automatically. No /ok-to-test needed.
• Members can do /ok-to-test for PRs that have a needs-ok-to-test label, and use commands like /close to close PRs as well.

Note: members who frequently contribute code are expected to proactively perform code reviews and work towards becoming a primary reviewer for the subproject that they are active in.

Reviewer

Reviewers are able to review code for quality and correctness on some part of a subproject. They are knowledgeable about both the codebase and software engineering principles.

Defined by: reviewers entry in an OWNERS file in a repo owned by the Kubernetes project.

Reviewer status is scoped to a part of the codebase.

Note: Acceptance of code contributions requires at least one approver in addition to the assigned reviewers.

Requirements

The following apply to the part of codebase for which one would be a reviewer in an OWNERS file (for repos using the bot).

• member for at least 3 months
• Primary reviewer for at least 5 PRs to the codebase
• Reviewed or merged at least 20 substantial PRs to the codebase
• Knowledgeable about the codebase
• Sponsored by a subproject approver
  • With no objections from other approvers
  • Done through PR to update the OWNERS file
• May either self-nominate, be nominated by an approver in this subproject, or be nominated by a robot

Responsibilities and privileges

The following apply to the part of codebase for which one would be a reviewer in an OWNERS file (for repos using the bot).

• Tests are automatically run for Pull Requests from members of the Kubernetes GitHub organization
• Code reviewer status may be a precondition to accepting large code contributions
• Responsible for project quality control via code reviews
  • Focus on code quality and correctness, including testing and factoring
  • May also review for more holistic issues, but not a requirement
• Expected to be responsive to review requests as per community expectations
• Assigned PRs to review related to subproject of expertise
• Assigned test bugs related to subproject of expertise
• Granted "read access" to kubernetes repo
• May get a badge on PR and issue comments

Approver

Code approvers are able to both review and approve code contributions. While code review is focused on code quality and correctness, approval is focused on holistic acceptance of a contribution including: backwards / forwards compatibility, adhering to API and flag conventions, subtle performance and correctness issues, interactions with other parts of the system, etc.

Defined by: approvers entry in an OWNERS file in a repo owned by the Kubernetes project.

Approver status is scoped to a part of the codebase.

Requirements

The following apply to the part of codebase for which one would be an approver in an OWNERS file (for repos using the bot).

• Reviewer of the codebase for at least 3 months
• Primary reviewer for at least 10 substantial PRs to the codebase
• Reviewed or merged at least 30 PRs to the codebase
• Nominated by a subproject owner
  • With no objections from other subproject owners
  • Done through PR to update the top-level OWNERS file

Responsibilities and privileges

The following apply to the part of codebase for which one would be an approver in an OWNERS file (for repos using the bot).

• Approver status may be a precondition to accepting large code contributions
• Demonstrate sound technical judgement
• Responsible for project quality control via code reviews
  • Focus on holistic acceptance of contribution such as dependencies with other features, backwards / forwards compatibility, API and flag definitions, etc
• Expected to be responsive to review requests as per community expectations
• Mentor contributors and reviewers
• May approve code contributions for acceptance

Subproject Lead

Defined by: owners entry in subproject OWNERS files as defined by sigs.yaml subproject.owners

The SIG Governance mentions in details the responsibilities of a Subproject Lead.

Subproject Owner

Defined by: owners entry in subproject OWNERS files as defined by sigs.yaml subproject.owners

The SIG Governance mentions in details the responsibilities of a Subproject Owner.

Inactive members

Members are continuously active contributors in the community.

A core principle in maintaining a healthy community is encouraging active participation. It is inevitable that people's focuses will change over time and they are not expected to be actively contributing forever.

However, being a member of one of the Kubernetes GitHub organizations comes with an elevated set of permissions. These capabilities should not be used by those that are not familiar with the current state of the Kubernetes project.

Therefore members with an extended period away from the project with no activity will be removed from the Kubernetes GitHub Organizations and will be required to go through the org membership process again after re-familiarizing themselves with the current state.

How inactivity is measured

Inactive members are defined as members of one of the Kubernetes Organizations with no contributions across any organization within 12 months. This is measured by the CNCF DevStats project.

Note: Devstats does not take into account non-code contributions. If a non-code contributing member is accidentally removed this way, they may open an issue to quickly be re-instated.

After an extended period away from the project with no activity those members would need to re-familiarize themselves with the current state before being able to contribute effectively.