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Becoming a maintainer

If Karan, our project owner, believes you are already operating at our maintainer standard, he may contact you to ask whether you would like to become a maintainer. If this is the case, we will follow our process of agreeing on the details on how frequently you are available to help.

If you were not approached and would like to become a maintainer, feel free to message Karan on Slack (@knjk04), either privately or on the Slack #book-project channel. If we say no, we will be constructive by telling you what you would need to do to get there (e.g. contribute for longer to gain further trust). Please do not feel disheartened if we say no. Think of it as 'not yet' rather than 'never'. If you ask Karan publicly on Slack, the assumption is that you are happy for a public response.

Why we have maintainers

While everyone can help shape the direction of the project, this is particularly true of maintainers, as the owner and other maintainers may lean on each other.

Our maintainers also help us push the project forward at a good pace.

Responsibilities

We expect our maintainers to make regular, meaningful commits to the project. 'Regular' is intentionally vague as we appreciate that different people have different levels of free time that they can spend on the project. Therefore, this is something that should be agreed upon with the project owner, Karan. For example, if you can only contribute once a month, that may be fine.

When a build breaks or when we have high-priority bugs to fix, we depend on the owner and maintainers to help create a patch quickly.

In addition to regularly committing, we expect our maintainers to review pull requests regularly. In general, we try to review pull requests within seven days (regular days, not working days) of having received them. If this is not feasible for you, please discuss this with the owner as we are somewhat flexible on this.

Lastly, we have an active Slack workspace and GitHub discussions area where we can provide help to committers. We expect maintainers to be active here to help others. We don't expect our maintainers always to be online, but to be responsive to messages directed towards them and undirected messages that they can help with. As a rule of thumb, we would expect maintainers to reply within seven days.

Try to keep us informed of where holidays and other engagements affect your availability.

As a regular committer, we may give them access rights to commit to the project. However, they are trusted not to do so unless until we have first reviewed their work. This also includes changes to the wiki

We appreciate this is a large commitment to make, so we highly value the time and effort of all of our maintainers to help push the project forward.

Commitment

If Karan has offered you the position of becoming a maintainer, we will ask you the following questions. These questions help us both set the expectations.

As explained in the core team document, we appreciate that becoming a maintainer is a big commitment (and we are very appreciative of our maintainers). We want to be flexible to respect your other commitments. If your availability changes, that's fine. The important thing is to let us know so that we can continue to be respectful of your time.

  1. At the very minimum, how frequently are you able to contribute (e.g. once a week, once a fortnight, etc.)?

  2. What is the main area that you will be able to help with (e.g. Spring, React, Docker, documentation, design etc.)?

  3. At the minimum, how often can you help with reviewing pull requests (we aim to review all pull requests within at most seven days)?

  4. Are you able to help fix failing builds or when we have high-priority bugs to fix regularly? If so, how often (e.g. weekly, fortnightly)?

  5. Are you able to help others and respond to others on our Slack workspace (we aim to respond to messages within at most seven days)?

Revoking maintainer privileges

If a maintainer becomes unresponsive for an extended period, or if they violate our code of conduct or responsibility, they can have their role revoked. While this may seem daunting, this should not come as a surprise as we should have already discussed this with you.

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