Community Guideline

TiDB community aims to provide harassment-free, welcome and friendly experience for everyone. The first and most important thing for any participant in the community is be friendly and respectful to others. Improper behaviors will be warned and punished.

We appreciate any contribution in any form to TiDB community. Thanks so much for your interest and enthusiasm on TiDB!

Code of Conduct

TiDB community refuses any kind of harmful behavior to the community or community members. Everyone should read our Code of Conduct and keep proper behavior while participating in the community.

Governance

TiDB development governs by two kind of groups:

• TOC: TOC serves as the main bridge and channel for coordinating and information sharing across companies and organizations. It is the coordination center for solving problems in terms of resource mobilization, technical research and development direction in the current community and cooperative projects.
• teams: Teams are persistent open groups that focus on a part of the TiDB projects. A team has its reviewer, committer and maintainer, and owns one or more repositories. Team level decision making comes from its maintainers.

A typical promoted path for a TiDB developer is from user to reviewer, then committer and maintainer, finally maybe a TOC member. But gaining more roles doesn't mean you have any privilege over other community members or even any right to control them. Everyone in TiDB community are equal and share the responsibility to collaborate constructively with other contributors, building a friendly community. The roles are a natural reward for your substantial contribution in TiDB development and provide you more rights in the development workflow to enhance your efficiency. Meanwhile, they request some additional responsibilities from you:

• Now that you are a member of team reviewers/committers/maintainers, you are representing the project and your fellow team members whenever you discuss TiDB with anyone. So please be a good person to defend the reputation of the team.
• Committers/maintainers have the right to approve pull requests, so bear the additional responsibility of handling the consequences of accepting a change into the codebase or documentation. That includes reverting or fixing it if it causes problems as well as helping out the release manager in resolving any problems found during the pre-release testing cycle. While all contributors are free to help out with this part of the process, and it is most welcome when they do, the actual responsibility rests with the committers/maintainers that approved the change.
• Reviewers/committers/maintainers also bear the primary responsibility for guiding contributors the right working procedure, like deciding when changes proposed on the issue tracker should be escalated to internal.tidb.io for wider discussion, as well as suggesting the use of the TiDB Design Documents process to manage the design and justification of complex changes, or changes with a potentially significant impact on end users.

There should be no blockers to contribute with no roles. It's totally fine for you to reject the promotion offer if you don't want to take the additional responsibilities or for any other reason. Besides, except for code or documentation contribution, any kind of contribution for the community is highly appreciated. Let's grow TiDB ecosystem through our contributions of this community.