GeoServer is a community of people doing different tasks to help out in different ways. Most of these tasks aren't formalized in any way, and we encourage you to jump in and get involved. A few roles, however, require a bit more of a formal process, as they can greatly affect others.

Committers

Committers have rights to write to the subversion repository directly. We can not open this up to everyone, as we need to make sure that everyone is quite careful about breaking the build, and thus stopping every one else's work. The current list of committers can be found at the Contributors page.

To gain commit rights, one first must submit several patches. See 1 Reporting Issues for more information on this process. Bug fixes and feature improvements are reviewed by a core committer, not just for how well they work, but also for coding style and readability, making sure they follow all the relevant project rules. If a consistent contributor demonstrates good work and not breaking the project build, then any committer can nominate them for 'commit rights'. This is sent to the devel list, and to get commit rights the user must recieve 3 +1 votes and no -1 votes. After this they will be able to commit to the source tree, though should ask for reviews if they are committing to an area of the code that is outside their expertise.

Project Steering Committee

GeoServer has recently formed a PSC! To learn about the PSC and how it operates head to this page.

Community contributions

Many time users won't be quite ready to commit directly to trunk, but will need a space to work out a few ideas. In cases like this we offer branches, and commit rights to work on the branch, with a relatively low bar. If granted branch rights, then please stay on the branch. It is your responsibility to sync up with the latest development branch, and when ready your code will be reviewed for inclusion in to the main development trunk. We are working in 1.4.x to achieve a more modular structure in GeoServer, which should decrease the need for branches. Developers will be able to create their own plug-ins for GeoServer, hosted by the GeoServer project or elsewhere.