Formalizing promotion to triagers/approvers/maintainers in repositories

[mx-psi]

We have some general guidelines on triagers, approvers, maintainers on the community repository but in practice they are not sufficiently specific. This is problematic both for SIGs (specially larger SIGs), since there is no explicit consensus mechanism for several maintainers to decide when to promote someone as well as for contributors that don't have clear expectations on how they can become a triager/approver/maintainer.

I would like us to provide general guidance about this, and possibly if there is consensus across the community to update the community repository to have a general rules about this. Some members of the Collector SIG, including myself, are interested in working on this for our SIG specifically, so we can start working with that.

Among the things that I think we should clarify are:

• Who is a stakeholder in this decision (e.g. for triagers, do approvers or existing triagers participate in the decision)?
• How is the process started?
• How can we make it fair?
• What level of support is needed among the stakeholders to promote someone?

[svrnm]

Thank you for raising this issue, @mx-psi, it's a really important one.

Related to that, I created this maintainer onboarding form a while back (it never got merged), which tried to address some of that: open-telemetry/community#1924

I would be curious how different SIGs are solving this today? Like when are you going to approach a contributor and ask them to become a triager, a triager an approver, etc? Or is it pure self-nomination?

[theletterf]

Joining this one!

[theletterf]

It'd be great to provide examples of some promotion processes and how they went (from the perspective of an existing contributor).