Date
1 - 3 of 3
[EXTERNAL] [cncf-toc] Idea: maintainers supporting each other / mailing list
Michelle Noorali
Thanks for bringing this up Matt. I agree many open source maintainers feel this way and we need to talk more about sustainable processes and expectations. We do have a maintainers mailing list but I don't see any activity between maintainers. I also don't
know if it's private. Brandon and I hosted two zoom meetings last year where we invited all the maintainers to give us feedback on what the CNCF can do for them. I learned a lot from those meetings including lots of maintainers have the same concerns and are
often met with the same scenarios. Perhaps, we could host quarterly zoom meetings for maintainers around topics related to burn out, code of conduct, common experiences, etc. to see where and how the CNCF can best help. A slack channel could also help create
a daily support system and way to share experiences more frequently. Thoughts?
From: cncf-toc@... <cncf-toc@...> on behalf of Matt Farina via Lists.Cncf.Io <matt=mattfarina.com@...>
Sent: Friday, January 17, 2020 10:27 AM
To: CNCF TOC <cncf-toc@...>
Cc: cncf-toc@... <cncf-toc@...>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] [cncf-toc] Idea: maintainers supporting each other / mailing list
Sent: Friday, January 17, 2020 10:27 AM
To: CNCF TOC <cncf-toc@...>
Cc: cncf-toc@... <cncf-toc@...>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] [cncf-toc] Idea: maintainers supporting each other / mailing list
The maintainer of a popular Rust project
quit this morning and took down the project. Buried in the post mortem:
Be a maintainer of large open source project is not a fun task. You alway face with rude and hate, everyone knows better how to build software, nobody wants to do home work and read docs and think a bit and very few provide any help.
If you maintain something that gets popular this is bound to happen. I appreciate that the CNCF requires maintainers from multiple organizations to graduate. This means the burnout of one person or organization isn't going to take down a project.
But, this doesn't do much for the mental health of the maintainers on the projects. Incubating and sandbox projects don't need to have multi-org maintainers so there is still risk. But, where is the CNCF support system to help them build more maintainers
and deal with the stress that comes along with being popular? The stress isn't just expectations others put on us. We sometimes put it on ourselves.
With that in mind, can we start to build out a support system. I would suggest starting with a mailing list that's maintainers only. A place where we maintainers can talk about things in private. Seek help, share ideas, get advice from others going through
it, and so forth. For some projects that overlap in space this would need to be done in the spirit of coopetition.
Thoughts?
- Matt Farina
Matt Farina
We do have a maintainers mailing list but I don't see any activity between maintainers.
There's isn't a general mailing list that maintainers can use to contact each other. There is a mass distribution list (not on lists.cncf.io) where all content sent to it is moderated. Maintainers are very much silo'd from each other in the current setup.
Kiran Mova
+1 to this idea.
On Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 12:58 AM Matt Farina <matt@...> wrote:
We do have a maintainers mailing list but I don't see any activity between maintainers.There's isn't a general mailing list that maintainers can use to contact each other. There is a mass distribution list (not on lists.cncf.io) where all content sent to it is moderated. Maintainers are very much silo'd from each other in the current setup.