Like in any other large project, members on the NeoForged team may become inactive and stop contributing to the project over long periods of time. This document outlines a policy to make sure that inactive members are routinely removed from the team in order to keep the team size at a healthy amount and fully active.
This document is:
- Intended to outline the procedure to pruning inactive Neoforged team members with minimal disagreements.
This document is not:
- Intended to be used to remove disliked members.
- Intended to ignore people that may have life situations that get in the way of contributions.
Every year, 7 months before the next planned Steering Council elections, the Steering Council members will review the list of all NeoForged team members. If a member has not been contributing for what their role is for over 12 months (Maintainers working on projects, Moderators watching conversations, subteam members working on their respective subprojects), the Steering Council will begin the following procedure:
- Reach out to the member in question and ask about their inactivity to the team. Wait at least 2 weeks for a response.
- If no response, reach out to other team members to verify that the person is inactive in the role they were assigned.
- If the member is still active and there is evidence of recent contribution presented, then the investigation is ended there and member remains on the team.
- If the member provides a reasonable excuse for their inactivity, such as life situations getting in the way, they may be granted an additional 6 months to remain on the team so they can have the time to get back into contributing once they are available to do so. This grace period must be agreed upon by 2/3rds of the Steering Council and will have the member marked by a Grace Period role to help keep track.
- If the member fails to provide a resonable excuse or failed to reply and no one has seen any recent contributions, then 2/3rds of the Steering Council must agree that the evidence shown means the member will be stripped from the team and given the Former Member role.
For Grace Period roled members that were granted a grace period by Steering Council, they will be reviewed again 1 month before Steering Council elections. If the member has not contributed enough, then the member will be removed from the team and given the Former Member role.
Members with two team roles (Example is Moderator and Maintainer), the person will be evaluated on each role separately. A person can lose one role they are inactive with but keep the other role they are contributing on.
Members who contribute extremely infrequently may get subjected to this inactivity procedure. This will be determined on a case-by-case basis to prevent people from contibuting one small thing every year to stay on the team. Ideally, active team members regularly contibute and their presence/contributions are felt by the rest of the team/community.
If a Former Member later wishes to rejoin the team, they can provide an application for the role and they will be judged just like any other person applying to join the team.
Steering Council members cannot be put through this process as per the voting.md document. Steering Council are re-elected every year and thus are routinely judged and replaced to ensure there are always active council members.