The meanings of the terms contributor, (project) maintainer, participant, and project leadership

[ianbollinger]

Is there a way any of these terms can be collapsed into each other? For instance, project leadership and project maintainers are (in my reading) synonymous, so perhaps the former term could be replaced in favor of the latter.

I don't have a firm understanding on what the difference is between a participant and a contributor, if there is intended to be one (this is perhaps a personal failing). I was leaning toward the interpretation that they were synonymous, since "participant" is only mentioned once. However, in this repository's own CODE_OF_CONDUCT file, contributors and participants are mentioned separately. So, I'm now guessing that, perhaps, a contributor is a participant who has contributed a patch (e.g., a translation, documentation, code, etc.), while a participant is anyone who has entered a project space. This creates the potential reading that while a (non-exhaustive) list of behaviors is proscribed for participants, it is contributors that make the pledge and that may be banned. A solution could be to make all contributors participants (since the latter term appears to be a superset), though this might create the implication that all participants have made a pledge before they've even had the opportunity to read the Covenant (say they just entered a project IRC channel to learn more about it).

However, my recommendation would be to live with the additional verbiage of adding a definitions section at the end of the Covenant and giving the terms maintainer, contributor, and participant explicit meanings.

[retrosight]

Seems like a thing to consider for the FAQ...?

This is how I've seen folks think of the different personas involved in a project:

• Leader - Has broad sway and say over the direction of the project, could be in any of the other roles.
• Maintainer - Has ownership of the project, typically with administrator or root access.
• Contributor - Contributes source code towards the project via forks, branches and or pull requests.
• Participant - Brings opinion, insight and management into the project without affecting source code directly or simply reads what they find in the project anonymously.

A case can also be made to simplify the language to remove all of the personas and go with participant throughout with the FAQ outlining and clarifying how it includes and encompasses all others: leader, maintainer, contributor.