rename the "core collaborator" terminology.

[ovflowd]

I propose that we remove the term "core" of "core collaborator" as the title of the team says https://github.com/orgs/nodejs/teams/collaborators (and also remove it from the description) and call it everywhere on our documentation as "collaborator"

The term "core" can mean many things, and although nodejs/node#57503 does an excellent job clarifying it, not many newcomers and outsiders will learn the document.

Hence, I believe removing the term "core" will be yet another improvement to remove said barriers of what being a collaborator means.

cc @nodejs/tsc

[Trott]

TL;DR:

• "Collaborator" is often used to mean "member of the team with write access to this particular repository" and not "member of the nodejs/collaborators team with write access to the nodejs/node repository".
• The use of "core collaborator" was to distinguish between those two things.
• Changing "core collaborator" to "collaborator" will remove indications of that distinction, possibly resulting in more confusion rather than less confusion. Rather than remove "core", perhaps it is better to change "core" to something else, although I don't know that there are a lot of better options.

We used "core collaborator" to distinguish collaborators on the nodejs/node repo from collaborators on other repos. I think "collaborator" used to be a GitHub term so it would appear in the interface, but I think they switched to something else at some point, perhaps "member". But when GitHub was using "collaborator" in the interface, just saying "collaborators" in the website repository would end up being confusing. Does it mean a member of nodejs/collaborators or does it mean a member of nodejs/website (or whatever the team is named). It was individuals in the latter that would show up in the website repo as having a "collaborator" label. But often it was the former that was meant.

Now that GitHub doesn't use the terminology as prominently, maybe it's fine to drop the "core", but you'll want to do a search through all the other repositories to make sure working group governance docs and so on don't use "collaborator" to mean something other than the nodejs/collaborators team. Doing that will require a lot of manual reading to figure out from context what is meant by "collaborator".

For example, in https://github.com/nodejs/citgm/blob/c299fae577ad328689ddf477310dfdd720f97e70/COLLABORATORS.md, I'm pretty sure "collaborator" means "member of the nodejs/citgm team" and not "member of the nodejs/collaborators team".

A lot of these will be difficult to tell. It's not obvious from https://github.com/nodejs/llnode/blob/de1f01d70a5c58111dd873d340f898023e4e8fe6/COLLABORATOR_GUIDE.md whether they mean "nodejs/collaborators" or "nodejs/llnode" and you might have to look at landed pull requests and commits to figure it out.

Or maybe it will make sense to use git blame and ask the author and/or frequent contributors to the repo. That's what I'd do for https://github.com/nodejs/release-cloudflare-worker/blob/cef301848596ba9d36d44f3c112f63a91045413d/COLLABORATOR_GUIDE.md, for example, because I have no idea which kind of collaborator they're talking about there.)

To avoid all that work and potential confusion (which already exists, as seen in the llnode doc, but will be potentially greatly increased by this change), it might be better to change "core collaborator" to some other term rather than changing it to "collaborator". Maybe "member of the nodejs/collaborators team"? Although that is awkward and long. I know when speaking, I and others will say "node core collaborators" but I don't know if "Node.js core collaborators" is any better than "core collaborators". (You can see why we went with "core collaborators".)

[Trott]

I see that GitHub does indeed still use the term "collaborator" in their documentation. It also still appears in the administrative interface, although it doesn't appear (as far as I've noticed) in the issues and pull requests interfaces the way it used to.

I'm pretty sure we chose the word "collaborator" to align with GitHub terminology. But then we needed to differentiate between different sets of collaborators. I imagine we still have that need.

[ovflowd]

I have the feeling the term collaborator was introduced back when nodejs was a single repository? I'm also completely fine using another naming for what we use today for "core collaborators" -- but to be honest, it also might be the sort of situation where this could be more work than needed.

The fact is that "core collaborators" is on the Node.js orgchart referred to @nodejs/collaborators 🤔 hence I thought collaborators already refers to GitHub collaborators but indeed then it refer to everyone on the org. I see that in some places GitHub uses the word "member" instead of collaborator.

Per GitHub docs, collaborator is used for personal projects, whereas member is used for org-members. Hence for our situation, collaborator would not mean org-members but potentially what we seem fit as "core collaborator"... Although the wording would the possibly vague.

[joyeecheung]

If it's just about the team name, another alternative is to rename it by project, to something like or @nodejs/node-core to be consistent with e.g. @nodejs/llnode (llnode collaborators). There will always be a distinction between those who have collaborator permission (by GitHub UI) in one repo and those who do not, even if they have collaborator permission in another repo in the org e.g. people who have collaborator permissions in the node repo does not automatically get the same permission in llnode, undici or corepack. They have their own governance and adding new collaborators to them need to go through a separate process determined by the collaborators of the repos in question.

[ovflowd]

If it's just about the team name, another alternative is to rename it to something like or @nodejs/node-core to be consistent with e.g. @nodejs/llnode (llnode collaborators). There will always be a distinction between those who have collaborator permission (by GitHub UI) in one repo and those who do not, even if they have collaborator permission in another repo in the org e.g. people who have collaborator permissions in the node repo does not automatically get the same permission in llnode, undici or corepack. They have their own governance and adding new collaborators to them need to go through a separate process determined by the collaborators of the repos in question.

Yeah, I think what you are describing is exactly what an org-member means. People will just be part os certain teams and have certain access to certain repositories.

But with James’s PR getting merged in core, it clarifies that the current stand of “core collaborator” although effectively gives access to nodejs/node; core collaborator means anyone that has significant contributions to Node.js as a whole, removing the confusion for some that Node.js core collaborator was strictly for contributors that work day-to-day on nodejs/node.

So not sure naming it node-core would ease said confusion. My intent here was on a naming that clearly gives it away that “core collaborator” is not about someone that works on the nodes/node repo, although, gets access granted to it as a mean of showing they are, well, part of the “core” of Node.js. Where core in this meaning refers to “primary/main”

[aduh95]

My intent here was on a naming that clearly gives it away that “core collaborator” is not about someone that works on the nodejs/node repo

Core collaborators are folks who work on the nodejs/node repo though, they are the collective owner of the nodejs/node project.

[ovflowd]

My intent here was on a naming that clearly gives it away that “core collaborator” is not about someone that works on the nodejs/node repo

Core collaborators are folks who work on the nodejs/node repo though, they are the collective owner of the nodejs/node project.

My understanding of nodejs/node#57503 differs from the statement above

[Trott]

My intent here was on a naming that clearly gives it away that “core collaborator” is not about someone that works on the nodejs/node repo

Core collaborators are folks who work on the nodejs/node repo though, they are the collective owner of the nodejs/node project.

My understanding of nodejs/node#57503 differs from the statement above

Can you please explain how? The word "core" does not seem to appear in the diff for that PR.

[ovflowd]

My intent here was on a naming that clearly gives it away that “core collaborator” is not about someone that works on the nodejs/node repo

Core collaborators are folks who work on the nodejs/node repo though, they are the collective owner of the nodejs/node project.

My understanding of nodejs/node#57503 differs from the statement above

Can you please explain how? The word "core" does not seem to appear in the diff for that PR.

Im referring to what the PR describes collaborators as. Nevermind.

[ovflowd]

(Closing as I want to avoid spending anyone's time with these topics. Apologies for the noise).