Membership

This section discusses membership in the mdBook team.

The path to membership

People who are looking to contribute on the mdBook tool generally start on either fixing bugs, implementing a new feature or reviewing open pull requests. If you need guidance or help, don’t hesitate to ask on the t-mdbook channel on Zulip!

mdBook member

Once an individual has been contributing regularly for some time, they can be promoted to the level of an mdBook team member (see the section on how decisions are made below). This title indicates that they are someone who contributes regularly.

It is hard to define the precise conditions when such a promotion is appropriate. Being promoted to member is not just a function of checking various boxes. But the general sense is that someone is ready when they have demonstrated three things:

• “Staying power” – the person should be contributing on a regular basis in some way. This might for example mean that they have completed a few projects.
• “Independence and familiarity” – they should be acting somewhat independently when taking on tasks, at least within the scope of their “mdBook area”. They should plausibly be able to mentor others on simple PRs.
• “Cordiality” – mdBook team members will be part of the Rust organization and are held to a higher standard with respect to the Code of Conduct. They should not only obey the letter of the CoC but also its spirit.

Being promoted to member implies a number of privileges:

• Members can add pull requests to the merge queue and can do reviews (they are expected to use those powers appropriately, as discussed previously).
• mdBook team members are members of the Rust organization so they can modify labels and be assigned to issues.
• Members become a part of the rust-lang/mdbook team on GitHub, so that they receive pings when people are looking to address the team as a whole.
• Members are listed on the rust-lang.org web page.

It also implies some obligations (in some cases, optional obligations):

• Members are expected to respond to FCPs in maximum 4 weeks (28 days).
• Members may take part in various other maintainer activities to help the team.
• Members are held to a higher standard than ordinary folk when it comes to the Code of Conduct.

What it means to be a mdBook team member

Once you’re a member of the mdBook team, a number of events will happen:

• You will gain access to a private Zulip stream, where internal discussions happen.
• You will be able to add pull requests to the merge queue.
• You will be able to start FCPs, but also approve and/or raise concerns on them.

How promotion decisions are made

After an individual has been contributing to mdBook for a while, they may be nominated in the private Zulip mdBook team channel by an existing team member. All nominations must be done in the private Zulip mdBook team channel.

The mdBook team members will check to see if there are concerns with extending a membership invitation to the individual and after 10 days (barring no objections), an invitation will be extended.

If the invitation is accepted by the individual, the mdBook team leads will update the team repository to reflect their new role.

Alumni status

If at any time an mdBook team member wishes to take a break from participating, they can opt to put themselves into alumni status. When in alumni status, they will be removed from GitHub aliases and the like, so that they need not be bothered with pings and messages. They will also not have the possibility to add pull requests to the merge queue anymore.

People in alumni status can ask to return to “active” status at any time. This request would ordinarily be granted automatically barring extraordinary circumstances.

Automatic alumni status after 6 months of inactivity

If a member or maintainer has been nonresponsive in mdBook for 6 months, they will be moved to the alumni status.