We’re happy to announce that we’ve started a new Special Interest Group on Contributor Strategy. Our mission is to help grow flourishing, sustainable communities that can have smooth journeys throughout their CNCF project lifecycle. To that end, we want to help you navigate topics like building governance - though we won’t act as yours - and give advice on how to hit some of the project milestones for incubation and graduation.
The charter goes into more detail about our mission and goals, and the contributing guide gives even more detail on how to participate.
Here’s where you can start:
- Take the survey: Outside of what we already know listed in our issues and the work that the TOC requests of us, we’d like to plan how else we can provide value to your projects. Consider this a deeper-dive survey into your programs and operations than the usual CNCF maintainer survey. This will help us collect best practices to share and help us focus our efforts. Have survey fatigue? We can set up a meeting if you’d rather talk, or we can come to a community meeting and do it openly. Or you can come to us at one of our meetings (more info below).
- Help build the Maintainer Circle: One of our goals is to help maintainers (i.e., reviewers, approvers, committers, owners, et. al.) build a community of your own, where you can share experiences and advice to support each other’s development as leaders of OSS projects. We’re calling this the Maintainers Circle for now, and it’s starting to come to life! But we need more folks on the planning team so we can be inclusive of all time zones in the starting stages. Please join us in the #maintainers-circle channel on the CNCF Slack and help curate and participate in activities amongst maintainers of 40+ projects. Here’s the very basic README and the backstory.
- Participate and engage with us: Come to a meeting, join the mailing list, the usual. We meet bi-weekly on Thursdays at 10:30a.m. PT (17:30 UTC) for an hour. Consider this an “ask us anything” space for help with contributor community building. If the time doesn’t work for you, but you’d like some help, reach out and we can coordinate time. You can also find us in the #sig-contributor-strategy channel on the CNCF Slack, file an issue, or participate in one of our working groups. We can be flexible to your group.
We’re looking forward to working with you all!
Your SIG-Contributor Strategy Chairs Paris Pittman, Josh Berkus, and Stephen Augustus