Module Review System

So as we’ve all acknowledged and agreed to change on numerous occasions now, we’re still making occasional decisions without properly reviewing them.

It feels like a good opportunity to leverage the module system, and implement formal policy that must be followed. Unless we do this, I feel things are unlikely to change. There should also be a standard way of implementing this policy across the group, so that things aren’t likely to be confused between modules.

I’ve drafted what such a policy might look like at https://communityit.etherpad.mozilla.org/18

Some thoughts on the draft, if we need such a policy and other alternatives to this, would be highly appreciated. Would be great if we can get plenty of feedback before our next meeting, so we can discuss if it should be approved, since meetings are where we make group-wide decisions.

This also plays a major part into the entrance strategy for new contributors. A common question I get when we’ve tried involving new people a couple of times in the past is “can I do x so that y will work better?” and I’ve never really known how to answer. There’s nothing saying I can’t approve that, but nothing saying I can. Therefore, those questions have tended to be left to mrz or just whoever set something up, and not following our module system.

Is there not already an existing system for module owners to follow? Does that not meet the needs of this group?

mozilla operates under a module ownership governance system. A module is a discrete unit of code or activity. An owner is the person in charge of a module or sub-module. A peer is a person whom the owner has appointed to help them. A module may have multiple peers and, very occasionally, multiple owners.

The system is overseen by the owner and peers of the Module Ownership module. Owners may add and remove peers from their modules as they wish, without reference to anyone else.

That’s the only information I can find about mozilla’s module system

This is more about leveraging our modules for the purpose of decision making. Since module ownership represents ownership of a service, it feels to make sense that we interlink the two

Does https://www.mozilla.org/hacking/module-ownership.html not help?

d’oh! Completely missed that

I’d guess we should use that to run our module system, I’ll link to it from our wiki page later