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+# RFC-0008: Roles and review capacity
+
+Related: storytold/photocraft#5439.
+
+## Summary
+
+Write down the contributor roles and what each may do, and name review as
+the bottleneck to plan around. Maintainers stay the ArtCraft team: owners
+decide who on the team reviews and merges which app. This RFC adds no path
+for people outside the team to become maintainers.
+
+## Motivation
+
+Review is now the bottleneck. Across the storytold organization, PRs opened
+and merged per day (from GitHub search, as of 2026-10-15):
+
+| Day | Opened | Merged |
+|---|---|---|
+| Oct 5 | 316 | 290 |
+| Oct 8 | 875 | 626 |
+| Oct 11 | 2058 | 1034 |
+| Oct 13 | 2214 | 1205 |
+| Oct 15 | 1132 | 692 |
+
+Since Oct 10, about 1000 more PRs are opened than merged every day. About
+4500 PRs are open, and almost all of them were opened in the last 7 days.
+
+The wait for a merge has grown too. Median time from opening a PR to merging
+it, for PRs merged that day:
+
+| Merged on | Median wait |
+|---|---|
+| Oct 5–10 | under 3 hours |
+| Oct 11–13 | about 9 hours |
+| Oct 14–15 | about 21 hours |
+
+This counts only PRs that were merged, so PRs still waiting make the real
+wait longer.
+
+Share of PRs already handled (merged or closed), by the day they were opened,
+as of Oct 15:
+
+| Opened on | Opened | Handled |
+|---|---|---|
+| Oct 5 | 316 | 99% |
+| Oct 8 | 875 | 95% |
+| Oct 10 | 2008 | 88% |
+| Oct 11 | 2058 | 79% |
+| Oct 12 | 2115 | 75% |
+| Oct 13 | 2214 | 54% |
+| Oct 14 | 1661 | 37% |
+
+The PRs themselves did not get bigger or harder to review. The median PR
+changed 98 to 279 lines in 3 to 7 files on every day from Oct 4 to Oct 15,
+with no upward trend (sample of 300 PRs per day). The wait grew because
+there are more PRs, not because each one takes longer to check.
+The team simply has far more PRs than time to review them.
+
+## Proposal
+
+1. **Roles**
+   - **Contributor**: anyone who opens issues or PRs. On Discord, contributor
+     tiers follow merged PRs, after linking a GitHub account:
+     - **Junior Contributor**: 1 merged contribution;
+     - **Contributor**: 10 merged contributions, or a large feature;
+     - **Senior Contributor**: given by hand to professionals with a large
+       contribution.
+     Tiers are given by these rules, not on request.
+   - **Maintainer**: a member of the ArtCraft team in `craft-app-team`, as in
+     RFC-0000. Owners decide who is on it.
+   - **Owner**: as in RFC-0000.
+2. **More review from the team.** Owners can give team members review and
+   merge rights for specific apps, so each app has someone responsible for
+   its queue.
+3. **Less review work per PR.** The other RFCs exist to cut the work a
+   reviewer does per PR: fewer duplicates (RFC-0003, RFC-0004), PRs that are
+   quick to check (RFC-0005), and agents that review their own diff before
+   opening a PR and answer review comments before opening more (RFC-0006).
+
+## Alternatives
+
+- **Change nothing.** The numbers above show the queue growing every day.
+- **Give merge rights to active outside contributors.** Not proposed: merge
+  rights stay with the team.