InstructLab Maintainer nomination

[mairin]

For details on how this process works, please see our contributor roles documentation

Which member are you nominating for a team change?
@jwm4

Which team are you nominating for this member for?
Core Maintainers

Make your case here: Why should the nominated member be on the proposed team?
Bill has been a member of the InstructLab community since November 14. Bill has helped with the SDG refactor effort (authoring https://github.com/instructlab/dev-docs/blob/main/docs/sdg/sdg-refactor.md) as well as working as a lead in the RAG tooling effort for InstructLab (see authored devdoc: https://github.com/instructlab/dev-docs/blob/main/docs/rag/rag-initial-code-location.md). Bill has also helped with PR review in eval and SDG, see:

eval/pull/156

• Unitxt evaluator eval#156 (comment)

sdg/pull/284

• Integrate Context-Aware Chunking and PDF Support sdg#284 (review)
• Integrate Context-Aware Chunking and PDF Support sdg#284 (comment)
• Integrate Context-Aware Chunking and PDF Support sdg#284 (comment)
• Integrate Context-Aware Chunking and PDF Support sdg#284 (comment)
• Integrate Context-Aware Chunking and PDF Support sdg#284 (comment)
• Integrate Context-Aware Chunking and PDF Support sdg#284 (review)
• Integrate Context-Aware Chunking and PDF Support sdg#284 (comment)
• Integrate Context-Aware Chunking and PDF Support sdg#284 (review)

sdg/pull/409

• Reconcile core data generation features with latest research advances sdg#409 (review)

sdg/pull/421

• Mix all the user's generated skills instead of 30 per leaf node sdg#421 (review)

He has opened the following code PRs:
instructlab/sdg#407
DS4SD/docling#193

Note:

This is a special case because the oversight committee (of which I am a member) is making a decision on this. Because Bill is working on a net new project for the InstructLab community (our RAG implementation), we haven't set up repos yet and this is very much a case of initial bootstrapping of a new project (thus including a docling PR.) see https://github.com/instructlab/community/blob/main/CONTRIBUTOR_ROLES.md#changes-by-oversight-committee-members

(The oversight committee will make a decision about this application via the lazy consensus - https://github.com/instructlab/community/blob/main/GOVERNANCE.md#decision-making-at-the-instructlab-organization-level. Documenting here for transparency!)

[nathan-weinberg]

These are supposed to be opened in the Core repo

[jwm4]

The guidance seems vague on where these should go:

One of the sponsors should open an issue in the relevant repository to provide a nomination.

It leaves open the question of what repository is "relevant". The repository for which the candidate would become a maintainer seems relevant, but so does the community repo. I think the guidance should be updated to be clearer.

[nathan-weinberg]

Feel free to open the guidance, but this is how it has worked since May