---
# System prepended metadata

title: 'Kafka PMC message, Draft 2'
tags: [kafka, apache]

---

# Kafka PMC message, Draft 2

Kafka PMC,

At the recent Kafka Summit ("Current"), you displayed a banner of the most active 100 contributors, celebrating their involvement. But you have not made them committers. Why?

Someone on this PMC needs to look at that list, and put some of them forward for committer. If they're valued enough to celebrate in that way, then *surely* a lot of them would make good committers. What is your hesitance to trust them, and allow these important contributors to own the results of their work?

Over the years, I have consistently heard complaints from Kafka contributors, and some committers, that the bar to committer is absurdly high, requiring 2-3 years of consistent contributions. This is a risk to the project, because few people are willing to stick around that long while their contributions are not considered "good enough" for the project's trust.

The risk of adding a committer "too early" is that you'll have to revert some commits. The risk of adding them too late is that they will go away and you'll lose an opportunity.

This results *directly* in your 1000 unmerged PRs, since you lack sufficiently many people trusted to review and merge them. This, in turn, results in a terrible first-contributor experience, since they're just added to the end of a dauntingly long queue that will never be seen. This feedback loop results, again, in a risk to project sustainability.

As a concerned member, and also with my board hat on, I urge you to take a more proactive approach to welcoming new committers to your project. (Note: A version of the above comment was made on your recent board report, but ended up not being sent due to my absence at the meeting.)

###### tags: `apache` `kafka`