The Trusted Committer (TC) role is one of the key roles in an InnerSource community. Think of Trusted Committers as the people in a community that you trust with important technical decisions and with mentoring contributors to ultimately get contributions over the finish line. The Trusted Committer role is both demanding and rewarding. It is more than just being an opinionated gatekeeper and is instrumental for the success of any InnerSource community.
Generally speaking, the Trusted Committer role is defined by its responsibilities, rather than by its privileges. On a very high level, Trusted Committers represent the interests of both their InnerSource community and the products the community is building. They are concerned with the health of both the community and the product. So as a Trusted Committer, you’ll have both tech- and community-oriented responsibilities. We’ll explore both of these dimensions in the following sections.
Before we go into the details of what a Trusted Committer actually does, let’s spend some time contrasting the Trusted Committer role with other roles in InnerSource at a high level of abstraction and explain why we think the name is both apt and important. Let’s start with the Contributor role. A Contributor — as the name implies—makes contributions to an InnerSource community. These contributions could be code or non-code artifacts, such as bug reports, feature requests, or documentation.
Contributors may or may not be part of the community. They might be sent by another team to develop a feature the team needs. This is why we sometimes also refer to Contributors as Guests or as part of a Guest Team. The Contributor is responsible for "fitting in" and for conforming to the community’s expectations and processes.
The Trusted Committer is always a member of the InnerSource community, which is also sometimes referred to as the Host Team. In this analogy, the Trusted Committer is responsible for both building the house and setting the house rules to ensure their guests are comfortable and can work together effectively. Compared to contributors, Trusted Committers have earned the responsibility to push code closer to production and are generally allowed to perform tasks that have a higher level of risk associated with them.
The Product Owner (PO) is the third role in InnerSource. Similar to agile processes, the PO is responsible for defining and prioritizing requirements and stories for the community to implement. The PO interacts often with the Trusted Committer, (e.g., in making sure that a requested or contributed feature actually belongs to the product). Especially in smaller, grassroots InnerSource communities, the Trusted Committer usually also acts as a PO. Check out our Product Owner Learning Path segment for more detailed information.
Why Role Names Matter
The role of the Trusted Committer is present in every successful InnerSource community but not every community uses that name. Some communities use the term Maintainer, but this term conflicts with other technical roles such as the "Maintainer" role defined by GitHub, for instance. Apache uses the term Committer, too, but they attach fewer and mostly tech-oriented responsibilities to that role. With its additional community-oriented responsibilities, the Trusted Committer role goes beyond that. The "Trusted" in Trusted Committer means this person is trusted and thus empowered by both their management and their community to do their job. By fostering openness and transparency, Trusted Committers build trust in the process and also in the product being built.
Similar to how naming is important in writing software, choosing the right names for roles and doing so consistently ensures that everyone has the same understanding about the roles played in the community.
Now that you have a basic understanding of the role, why using the term Trusted Committer is appropriate, and know how a Trusted Committer might interact with other common roles in a software project, let’s take a quick look at the responsibilities of a Trusted Committer.
Responsibilities
Trusted Committers have various responsibilities, including:
We will look at these responsibilities in more depth in the following pages and also explore the path of becoming a Trusted Committer at the end of this article.
