VIVO Committers Group

VIVO Committers have autonomous control over the code and have the following primary responsbilities:

• Maintain the codebase; Committers are the only individuals who can actively change/commit to the codebase
• Review all code contributions/changes to ensure stability, etc.
• Merge/accept community code contributions
• Help to resolve bugs or security issues within codebase
• Help to provide ongoing support to community developers and users via community forums (e.g. mailing lists, etc.)
• Perform and manage new releases based on the roadmap

Anyone may be nominated as a Committer by anyone else. Typically, nominations are made by existing Committers on the basis of sustained contribution to VIVO that indicates an ability to fulfil Committer responsibilities. Examples of such contribution are participation in discussions on the VIVO mailings lists, participation in developer meetings, reporting bugs, help with testing, and contribution of code via pull requests. Only existing Committers may vote to add a nominated person to the Committers group. 

Committers

The following individuals are current Committers for VIVO open source software:

• Graham Triggs - Duraspace
• Jim Blake
• Ted Lawless
• Brian Lowe
• Tim Worrall
• Huda Khan

Emeritus Committers

Emeritus Committers are those who, for one reason or another, are no longer able to contribute code to VIVO on a regular basis. They are still members of the Committers Group, but are currently acting in an advisory role within the VIVO development community. We wish to recognize the contributions each of these individuals has made to VIVO software over the years. Their code contributions and guidance have played an integral part in helping to make VIVO what it is today.

• Jon Corson-Rikert - Cornell

Committer Discussions / Meetings

As much as possible, Committers ensure that all VIVO technology decisions are transparent to the developer community. The only exception is when security issues require us to resolve them before they are publicly reported.

• All Developer Meetings are open for anyone to attend. The meeting minutes are publicly available.
• Technology discussions take place in the following places:
  • vivo-techl Mailing list
  • VIVO Issue Tracker (When discussion is related to a specific ticket).
  • GitHub [Vitro / VIVO] (When discussion is related to a specific GitHub pull request)
• Occasionally on the Wiki itself, usually for early scoping and proposals of features/changes - especially larger developments involving a co-ordinated effort.
• All technology decisions are made following our Developer Voting Procedures