Dear Community,
I recently started thinking about how to make a project like CentOS more transparent and open (especially for new contributors). The http://wiki.centos.org/Team page (which Dag created about a year ago) lists about 20 (more or less active) members, divided into core and community contributors. I personally do not like that kind of distinction. Of course there should be something like a 'board' and clear responsibilities (release management and such), but at least the board should be elected by all active members.
As we are a community of ppl with high technical skills probably only persons with a valuable number of contributions and knowledge will be elected to the board. A board member could of course be responsible for core dev tasks, too.
The board itself could consist of a mix of technical, marketing, or legal orientated ppl.
To make this happen, the new maintainer process has to be clarified first. I am thinking about a (frequently maintained) list of open tasks e.g. maintained within trac, from which a new (and even existing) maintainer could choose one. Of course suggestions for task that are not listed there could be published on the ML.
The 'Team' page should list major tasks one is working on or responsible for. If one needs help (e.g. I am in need of help for the website update), he/she could add a note to this task list (and maybe even announce on the ML) with contact details (wiki homepage).
Other areas of taking part should and are already covered on:
http://wiki.centos.org/Contribute
But some aspects are still unclear:
THE WIKI:
For me a wiki is a collaboration platform which should be accessible to every contributor in the same manner (except the front and user pages). That means there should be a join process (where you have to agree to the cc license) which then leads to EditGroup membership.
I do not see a good reason why new articles should first be published on the ML. A user should be able to add a new article and then announce it on the ML (if necessary). Same on the personal pages. Of course it makes sense that new users introduce theirself on the ML but they should already have access to their own personal page, before.
A comment function could be a good feature but in a comparatively small community like ours, most of everything can be discussed via ML or could be handled through page changelog.
I personally see no reason to honor authorship of created pages besides the wiki page history.
THE BUGTRACKER:
The CentOS bugtracker contains a lot of upstream bugs that cannot be fixed here. We have to make sure that these are tracked upstream and fixed there.
THE CONTRIB REPO:
This repository has been re-invited in CentOS 5.3 but it's still unclear what it's meant to be for. Could it contain non-free packages. Should'nt oss packages better be pushed to EPEL/RPMFusion or even RPMForge?
Where should spec files go? Is there an SVN with write access and an automated build process, already?
Barriers on this site should be lowered when it's clear what the repo is meant for.
QA:
Some of you might know that CentOS has got an QA process before releases. This is an closed process and invite only. There where some reasons for it (e.g. some ppl only took part in the beta program to get early access to upcoming releases) but an invite only QA could not be the solution. This process should be open to all members.
BARRIERS:
Overall, the barriers for new contributors are much too high. This can also be fixed with something like a mentorship program where longtime developers take care about new maintainers.
Best Regards Marcus Moeller