Seeking Feedback: Community Growth WG initiatives

[smoya]

Introduction

The Community Growth Working Group (CGWG) at AsyncAPI is currently pending funding but poised to make significant contributions to the community. Your input is crucial in shaping its direction and initiatives. Before diving in, please familiarize yourself with the WG's Objectives and Roadmap outlined here and here, respectively.

Call to action

Whether you're a maintainer, contributor, or someone eager to contribute but hasn't found the opportunity yet, we welcome your insights. Please take a moment to share your thoughts. Feel free to answer on the following topics or rather any other:

• As a maintainer, what support or assistance do you believe the Community Growth WG can provide you with?
• As a contributor, how do you envision the Community Growth WG aiding your contributions?
• In general, what areas do you think the Community Growth WG should focus on?
• What role should the Community Growth WG play? Should it serve as an advisor for maintainers and contributors, or do you see other potential roles?
• What tasks or initiatives do you believe should be prioritized in the Community Growth WG's roadmap?
• We kindly request that you leave your feedback and opinions in separate comments to facilitate tracking and discussion.

Thank you in advance for your valuable input! Your feedback is so crucial in fostering a sustainable and healthy community. 🙌

cc @Barbanio @thulieblack @alequetzalli @AceTheCreator

[smoya]

I had a very fascinating and productive conversation with @derberg, and these are my notes based on his feedback. It includes my own ideas based on his. Again, thanks @derberg for your availability and your dedication to the cause 🙌

Explicit requests

• Docs about how CI/CD works
• What does it mean to be a contributor.
• What does it mean to be maintainer, duties, profits.
• Cheatsheet with those maintainer duties (basics, triaging, reviewing, reaction time, expectations, etc)
• What does it mean to be TSC member, after becoming maintainers.
• Becoming contributor
  • A generic guide to maintainers on how to attract new contributors.
  • A generic guide to potential candidates on how they can become contributors. Usually, this will be a first contact, then redirect to each repo guide if there is any. See https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/internals/contributing/
• Path from contributor to maintainer.
  • A generic guide to maintainers on how to attract new maintainers.
  • A generic guide to contributors on how they can become maintainers. Usually, this will be a first contact, then redirect to each repo guide if there is any.
• To document Triager/Committer roles in website in a generic way. How to become one or the other.
• To track down the Triager/Commiter progress in website. In order to measure success. In that way, we will understand if that approach makes sense in that repo. We earn knowledge about that approach. Then promote in the cases it make sense to try.
• Help writing an application for a fund (money) so we can get more sponsors who can pay and hire full-time contributors on AsyncAPI.

Feedback, phrases and my own thoughts

• “You won’t help me bringing more maintainers in , but you can for sure gimme tools that will make it easier to me”
• “I believe that for example getting more maintainers in  is a job of a maintainer of that project”
• Every project owners have the right to decide how they want to grow up their maintainers list. For example, Java template maintainers maybe dont need to grow their number of maintainers. And maybe they don’t event want to participate in Bounties, etc. As long as they manage to maintain their repositories, all is fine (and as far as they keep governance open). If for example tomorrow they need to grow their maintainers list, they will need documentation on how to do it, how to convert contributor-to-maintainer. That’s where the WG will help by having those guides and give support.
• Generic documentation, like contributor-to-maintainer guides, could be just pointing to different paths, like:
  • Do you have someone already in the community that could be a candidate? Maybe you need to motivate it with money? → Bounty could help.
  • Do you need to attract new people? → Do you have a contributor guide? Maybe mentorship can help? what about creating good-first issues? Do you need promotion via Social Media? Any requirement in particular you wanna share with the WG?
• This recent post of Lukasz made me realise some points we could help as WG, but also that there are many more ways to help the community to grow than I thought. Food for thought definitely.

[Barbanio]

@smoya, your shared information and reflections are very interesting and useful. Thank you very much! I leave here the information that some maintainers gave about the needs of some repositories:

Specific information on some repositories according to several of their maintainers:

React

Repository needs:

• Redesign or at least improve the existing one a bit.
• It would be necessary to split the React component into several and make a component library instead. Maybe even rename it to asyncapi/ui or asyncapi/documentation-ui.
• We'd have to check what's there because I think not everything you show is correct. Trying to fix all the bugs people have reported would already be a good start.
• Make sure it works in the most popular frameworks.

Knowledge and requirements to become a maintainer:

• Frontend: JS, HTML, CSS, React, etc.
• Doesn't really need a lot of experience. Just someone with a bit of good taste in design.

Bindings

Knowledge and requirements to become a maintainer:

• Much endurance because discussions of changes can take up to 6 months.
• Having software architect skills like: explaining problem to others, general communication skills, conflict resolution, creative thinking.
• A good understanding of messaging at all. I would advise at least 3 years of experience with messaging.
• Being in contact with at least 3 messaging solutions to get an understanding of what is solution specific and what are repeating patterns.

CLI

Maintainer responsibilities:

• Positively represent asyncapi/cli.
• Hang out in the #04_tooling Slack channel.
• Participate in formal decision making in terms of the project.
• Need to use the following command Structure and Patterns verb + noun and namespace + noun + [verb] pattern for making our commands and arguments. For example asyncapi validate <spec-file-path> and asyncapi config context add <context-name> <spec-file-path>.

Glee

Maintainer responsibilities:

• Positively represent asyncapi/glee.
• Hang out in the #04_tooling Slack channel.
• Participate in formal decision-making in terms of the project.

Knowledge and requirements to become a maintainer:

• Typescript
• Node.js (Specially how events work in Node.js).
• Familiarity with the following protocols: KAFKA, HTTP, WS, MQTT.

Modelina

Knowledge and requirements to become a maintainer:

• Feeling that the tool is your own.

Information of interest about the repository:
https://github.com/asyncapi/modelina/blob/master/docs/champions.md

Parser-api

Knowledge and requirements to become a maintainer:

• To be a maintainer of a parser.

Parser-js

Needs of the repository:

• The maintainers' job is to enable developers to interact with an AsyncAPI document.

Studio

Knowledge and requirements to become a maintainer:

• Zustand
• React
• Typescript
• Turborepo
• Storybook

[smoya]

Closing until we, as a WG, refine the objectives of the group. We can always open a new one based on the content of this discussion, which I believe it is very valuable.