Maybe a way through this would be to flatten the distinctions and have a separate focus on things like voting procedures.
For instance, I am not actually convinced that someone who implements a new C++ feature is of more value to the project (whatever that means) than someone who writes a great vignette that educates users about the feature. Or that they are of more value than an SGB or committee member who keeps the lights on.
So why don’t we flatten out the distinctions and make everyone who contributes to Stan a developer.
What if instead of the three tiers, we have things like
- Developer (C++)
- Developer ®
- Developer (Documentation)
- Developer (Leadership)
- Developer (OCaml)
- Developer (Python)
- Developer (Community) [for people running things like “Stan in X”]
- etc etc etc
Many of our more fancy folk would be multi-hyphenate. Some of the categories (mainly leadership) might end a time qualifier. But the idea is that we are all involved in rowing this boat, so why are we making distinctions when we could instead just say “we are all of value, here are the specifics”.
This removes the admin requirements (eg who can review PRs) because in some big important sense that’s an implementation detail rather than a design one. I’m not sure that there are people who have the skill and Stan experience to review PRs who don’t have the permissions. At least not for long.
It would be possible to have a barrier for recognition (eg a substantial contribution to documentation, a substantial feature or pull request), but it would allow us to legitimately recognize the people who make Stan special. It also gives multiple low-stakes routes into becoming a developer, as it’s perhaps an easier experience to go from contributing docs to contributing Python to contributing C++.
Does this help with the voting? Nope.
Maybe having the electorate on a particular issue as a combination of automatically added people (eg “they’ve contributed to stanc3”) and always have it open to people who give reasons that they should vote on this specific issue?