The goal of this document is to create a contribution process that:
- Encourages new contributions.
- Encourages contributors to remain involved.
- Avoids unnecessary processes and bureaucracy whenever possible.
- Creates a transparent decision making process that makes it clear how contributors can be involved in decision making.
- A Contributor is any individual creating or commenting on an issue or pull request.
- A Committer is a subset of contributors who have been given write access to the repository.
- A Project Captain is the lead maintainer of a repository.
- A TC (Technical Committee) is a group of committers representing the required technical expertise to resolve rare disputes.
- A Triager is a subset of contributors who have been given triage access to the repository.
Log an issue for any question or problem you might have. When in doubt, log an issue, and any additional policies about what to include will be provided in the responses. The only exception is security disclosures which should be sent privately.
Committers may direct you to another repository, ask for additional clarifications, and add appropriate metadata before the issue is addressed.
Please be courteous and respectful. Every participant is expected to follow the project's Code of Conduct.
Any change to resources in this repository must be through pull requests. This applies to all changes to documentation, code, binary files, etc. Even long term committers and TC members must use pull requests.
No pull request can be merged without being reviewed.
For non-trivial contributions, pull requests should sit for at least 36 hours to ensure that contributors in other timezones have time to review. Consideration should also be given to weekends and other holiday periods to ensure active committers all have reasonable time to become involved in the discussion and review process if they wish.
The default for each contribution is that it is accepted once no committer has an objection. During a review, committers may also request that a specific contributor who is most versed in a particular area gives a "LGTM" before the PR can be merged. There is no additional "sign off" process for contributions to land. Once all issues brought by committers are addressed it can be landed by any committer.
In the case of an objection being raised in a pull request by another committer, all involved committers should seek to arrive at a consensus by way of addressing concerns being expressed by discussion, compromise on the proposed change, or withdrawal of the proposed change.
If a contribution is controversial and committers cannot agree about how to get it to land or if it should land then it should be escalated to the TC. TC members should regularly discuss pending contributions in order to find a resolution. It is expected that only a small minority of issues be brought to the TC for resolution and that discussion and compromise among committers be the default resolution mechanism.
Anyone can become a triager! Read more about the process of being a triager in the triage process document.
Currently, any existing organization member can nominate a new triager. If you are interested in becoming a triager, our best advice is to actively participate in the community by helping triaging issues and pull requests. As well we recommend to engage in other community activities like attending the TC meetings, and participating in the Slack discussions.
You can also reach out to any of the organization members if you have questions or need guidance.
All contributors who land a non-trivial contribution should be on-boarded in a timely manner, and added as a committer, and be given write access to the repository.
Committers are expected to follow this policy and continue to send pull requests, go through proper review, and have other committers merge their pull requests.
The TC uses a "consensus seeking" process for issues that are escalated to the TC. The group tries to find a resolution that has no open objections among TC members. If a consensus cannot be reached that has no objections then a majority wins vote is called. It is also expected that the majority of decisions made by the TC are via a consensus seeking process and that voting is only used as a last-resort.
Resolution may involve returning the issue to project captains with suggestions on how to move forward towards a consensus. It is not expected that a meeting of the TC will resolve all issues on its agenda during that meeting and may prefer to continue the discussion happening among the project captains.
Members can be added to the TC at any time. Any TC member can nominate another committer to the TC and the TC uses its standard consensus seeking process to evaluate whether or not to add this new member. The TC will consist of a minimum of 3 active members and a maximum of 10. If the TC should drop below 5 members the active TC members should nominate someone new. If a TC member is stepping down, they are encouraged (but not required) to nominate someone to take their place.
TC members will be added as admin's on the Github orgs, npm orgs, and other resources as necessary to be effective in the role.
To remain "active" a TC member should have participation within the last 12 months and miss no more than six consecutive TC meetings. Our goal is to increase participation, not punish people for any lack of participation, this guideline should be only be used as such (replace an inactive member with a new active one, for example). Members who do not meet this are expected to step down. If A TC member does not step down, an issue can be opened in the discussions repo to move them to inactive status. TC members who step down or are removed due to inactivity will be moved into inactive status.
Inactive status members can become active members by self nomination if the TC is not already larger than the maximum of 10. They will also be given preference if, while at max size, an active member steps down.
The Express TC can designate captains for individual projects/repos in the organizations. These captains are responsible for being the primary day-to-day maintainers of the repo on a technical and community front. Repo captains are empowered with repo ownership and package publication rights. When there are conflicts, especially on topics that effect the Express project at large, captains are responsible to raise it up to the TC and drive those conflicts to resolution. Captains are also responsible for making sure community members follow the community guidelines, maintaining the repo and the published package, as well as in providing user support.
Like TC members, Repo captains are a subset of committers.
To become a captain for a project the candidate is expected to participate in that
project for at least 6 months as a committer prior to the request. They should have
helped with code contributions as well as triaging issues. They are also required to
have 2FA enabled on both their GitHub and npm accounts. Any TC member or existing
captain on the repo can nominate another committer to the captain role, submit a PR to
this doc, under Current Project Captains section (maintaining the sort order) with
the project, their GitHub handle and npm username (if different). The PR will require
at least 2 approvals from TC members and 2 weeks hold time to allow for comment and/or
dissent. When the PR is merged, a TC member will add them to the proper GitHub/npm groups.
expressjs/express: @wesleytoddexpressjs/discussions: @wesleytoddexpressjs/expressjs.com: @crandmck, @jonchurchexpressjs/body-parser: @wesleytodd, @jonchurchexpressjs/multer: @LinusUexpressjs/morgan: @jonchurchexpressjs/cookie-parser: @wesleytoddexpressjs/cors: @jonchurchexpressjs/generator: @wesleytoddexpressjs/statusboard: @wesleytoddpillarjs/encodeurl: @blakeembreypillarjs/path-to-regexp: @blakeembreypillarjs/router: @dougwilson, @wesleytoddpillarjs/finalhandler: @wesleytoddpillarjs/request: @wesleytoddjshttp/http-errors: @wesleytodd, @jonchurchjshttp/cookie: @wesleytoddjshttp/on-finished: @wesleytoddjshttp/forwarded: @wesleytoddjshttp/proxy-addr: @wesleytodd
- Triage team ref: @UlisesGascon