Groups

Groups

A Group is a collection of Participants who engage in open conversation about a common interest. That interest may be in the creation, enhancement, or maintenance of a specific body of code or it may lie in other areas, e.g., quality or documentation.

Groups are meant to capture the slowly-evolving social structure of the Community. They are usually longer-lived than Projects and therefore more difficult to create and dissolve. Generally speaking, a new Group should be proposed only after it has become clear that an existing nontrivial set of regular Participants who are already collaborating together would benefit from its creation. These are not meant to be lightweight “interest groups”.

A Group may have web content, independent of any Project, which is writable by all of the Group’s Members. A Group also has one or more mailing lists. A Group does not have file repositories of its own but it may sponsor Projects, which do.

The Bylaws define several ways for the Community to expand via Groups. A step-by-step guide is provided here for the following common cases:

• Nominating a Contributor to be a Group Member
• Nominating a Committer or Group Member to be an OpenJDK Member
• Proposing a New Group
• Nominating an OpenJDK Member who is a Group Member to be Group Lead

This page is a summary and interpretation of the Bylaws. If there is a conflict between this page and the Bylaws then the Bylaws are considered authoritative.