Things that would help:
- A process for keeping GitHub team assignments aligned with Discourse badges that doesn’t depend on a single person. I was hoping to create a scripted process for this (at least to scan and report discrepancies), but haven’t been able to get API access to Discourse and ran into some limitations on the Discourse API.[ref]
- A forum for discussing dev stage assignments (e.g., the “dev3-5” meta-group @michael mentioned). We’d probably want a private forum so people could be frank & honest in their opinions.
- A clear way for people to suggest a dev stage assignment. Maybe this is a post to the meta-group? Devs could suggest a change for themselves or anyone else. We’d expect at least /dev/5s to be looking for opportunities where someone is deserving of a new stage.
- A regular (e.g., 2- or 3-month) meeting to review potential re-assignments. We could always address these inbetween, but a regular meeting would ensure that outstanding issues don’t languish.
- A regular (e.g., 2x or 3x each year) review of the entire process (forced conversations like this one). I was thinking of doing this with /dev/5s, but it could really be /dev/5s + anyone interested.
At the end of the day, my primary interest in Dev Stages is to explicitly acknowledge people’s level of engagement with the community (from “community member” to “leader”). It’s not like this is a simple sequence of activities in a perfectly straight line, but I think it’s important to acknowledge and encourage greater depths of engagement. In the end, we need more people contributing, more people coordinating contributions, and more people spending time in the important “meta” efforts of enabling everyone else. The ability for people to publicize and discover people’s general level of technical skillset is a nice side effect. 