Allow any Voting Member to initiate nomination process for adding new role members

[dhomeier]

In response to #435 (comment) this PR is modifying the nomination policy to permit any Voting Member to invite a nominee, open a PR and send the announcement to start the voting period, i.e. the first 5 steps described in the nomination process. It also changes message templates accordingly.

In the present form, this does not specifically mandate any confirmation from the CoCo in this phase, though this could still be added – specifically, if maintainer_access.md should still mention "acceptance [of the nomination] by CoCo" this should indeed be confirmed before step 1.

[pllim]

Overall, this sounds sensible. Thanks!

[kelle]

Looks great! I just made one tweak based on Pey Lian's comment.

[eteq]

My small tweak is that I think we should allow maintainers who are not voting members to be able to suggest additional maintainers within their domain.

Note in the wording I suggested I just said "maintainer in a related role", which I realize is a bit ambiguous, but that's on purpose: I am just meaning that someone who is not a voting member and also has no connection to the role being proposed should not be encouraged to do this, but in practice that's almost impossible to define cleanly (e.g. does the web site maintainer also count as overlapping with docs? Or is that not close enough 🤷 ), so we can just say it this way.

[pllim]

LGTM. Thanks!

[dhomeier]

Sounds like a good solution to me; especially this might include a maintainer for a different coordinated or subpackage that however has a strong dependency on the one needing the new member.

[pllim]

2-week comment period has started: https://groups.google.com/g/astropy-dev/c/w9GI11G4H0Q

[mhvk]

I like it in general. But I think personally I would tend/prefer to check with others before just sending a message to someone nominating them. Is that something worth mentioning? At some level it is obvious.

[eteq]

The two week comment period has passed, the CoCo also discussed as is happy with this once @dhomeier addresses @mhvk's point. After that this is ready to be merged.

[dhomeier]

I like it in general. But I think personally I would tend/prefer to check with others before just sending a message to someone nominating them. Is that something worth mentioning? At some level it is obvious.

Hi @mhvk, I just realised that I had probably misread your suggestion, thinking you meant checking with the nominee.
I assume now you mean checking with other members if they support that nomination?
That is also sensible, and perhaps to some degree obvious, but I find it hard to codify in a rule.
Could you confirm if this reasonably phrased?

[mhvk]

@dhomeier - your change is exactly what I had in mind - that generally one would check with one or two others before nominating. You want to have a bit of a sense whether the nomination has support beforehand.

[pllim]

Given all the approvals and resolved discussion, I merged this. Thanks, all!

[pllim]

Should the first paragraph in adding-new-role-members.md be updated also?

[dhomeier]

Updated to say what? The process itself is still ultimately in the hands of CoCo; I don't see much to be changed there.

[pllim]

Here is the current wordings:

---

This document describes the process for adding new people to named roles. This document is not about how people are nominated for a role in the first place, but rather the process by which they are added once nominated. The process itself is in the hands of the Coordination Committee according to APE0.

---

The "This document is not about how people are nominated for a role in the first place" part threw people off. Because they thought only CoCo can make the nomination, which is in conflict with our updated Step 1.

[dhomeier]

I thought it was about the third sentence; that second sentence had me confused a bit as well, but not because I read it as “only CoCo may nominate people”, but because it gives the impression the nomination process itself is described in another document. But that document is APE 0, which states

Anyone can be nominated as a Voting Member by providing evidence of meeting the requirements laid out in the Membership section above. Both self-nominations and nominations by others are allowed.

So nomination has always been open to everyone, nothing about that has changed with this PR.

[pllim]

Maybe we should either point to specific section in the APE 0 or repeat the text here, because APE 0 is a lot to read and if people read the wrong parts, they can get confused. What do you think?

[pllim]

Anyone can be nominated as a Voting Member

Wait... when I read the excerpt from #436 (comment) again, it is about nominating a voting member, not a named role on the Team page.

[pllim]

Please see #452 for a follow-up. Thanks!