The Apache NiFi community is comprised of Project Management Committee (PMC) Members, Committers, Contributors, and users.

Committers are the group of volunteers who are responsible for the technical aspects of the Apache NiFi Project. This group has write access to the appropriate source repositories and these volunteers may cast binding votes on any technical discussion. Membership as a Committer is by invitation only and must be approved by consensus approval of the active Apache NiFi PMC members on a vote open for at least 72 hours. Membership can be revoked by a unanimous vote of all the active PMC members (except the member in question if they are a PMC member). The Policy for Inactive Committers provides additional details on activity requirements.

It is essential that we as a community work to constantly grow the community and help those who have demonstrated an interest to progress ultimately to the PMC.  In that spirit we would also like to clearly identify the sorts of contributions and engagements the PMC looks for when identifying candidates for committer or PMC membership.  A fundamental question PMC members will ask themselves in considering candidates is whether that individual has build up enough merit in the community and that they have a high degree of confidence in their ability to positively contribute to the project such that they are confident enough to grant that person write access to the code and website.

First, please read this document which is the primary source document comes from the Apache Software Foundation guidance regarding contributors.

We, the PMC, has attempted to make this as evidence based as possible.  When discussing a contributor being considered for committer access and/or PMC membership we attempt to put together a corpus of interaction in the community, both negative and positive, and use this as a basis for discussion.  The interaction with the community can include:

• Interaction on the mailing lists - is this person helping others?  Is this person using the community to enhance his/her understanding of the project or the apache foundation?
• Code contributions - is this person contributing code that advances the project?  How important is the code?  Is this a specialized capability, a core capability? How challenging was the contribution?  Was the code improving the quality of the project (bug fix, adding tests).  How does this person react to criticism of his/her contribution?  Is the contribution of high quality?
• Assisting others with their contributions - is this person providing useful comments on pull requests or patches?  Is this person testing new features and functionality and providing feedback on the mailing lists?
• Participation in project votes and discussions: Is this person helping to verify releases?  Providing input to the roadmap?  Is this person using the lists to get feedback on features they would like to implement?
• Documentation contributions: Is this person helping the community by blogging?  Providing patches to the web pages or in-app docs?  Contributing to the project wiki?
• Other community/project activities - has this person organized or talked at a meetup or conference about NiFi or its community?
• Legal: Has this person contributed positively to ensuring proper adherence to ASF and NiFi licensing guidance as well as honored the Apache and Apache NiFi trademark guidelines.
• "Going over and beyond" factor - Has this person done something to go to great lengths to fix or diagnose a critical issue?

An underlying theme of the above factors: the ASF code of conduct is taken seriously by the PMC - while interacting with the community, was this person adhering to the guidelines?  Are we seeing a pattern of openness, empathy, inquisitiveness, and willingness to cooperate?

In general we look for seeing these patterns and engagements to occur over some period of time.  There is no strict rule but several months of continued contribution along the lines discussed above are helpful to achieve consideration for committer status and some period longer for PMC status.