Document project roles and duties
Problem/Opportunity Statement
It's not always clear what we mean by terms like "maintainer", "contributor", and "community member". Efforts like #822 (closed) need to use these terms. We should define them clearly.
What would success / a fix look like?
Document these roles and their duties, put it on our website. Something like:
A regular contributor has a sustained engagement with the project over a period of months or years. It is okay for a contributor to participate primarily in their own self-interest, and only incidentally out of altruism. A contributor could be paid or a volunteer.
Contributor duties include:
- Creating issues to capture bug reports and feature requests
- Writing code and documentation that solves these issues
- Responding to code reviews
- Communicating effectively with others in a public collaborative environment
- If they can, attending regular project meetings
A maintainer takes long-term interest in the health and progress of the upstream Exosphere project. This interest is broader than a specific use case or vertical market. A maintainer's balance of self-interest and altruism tilts toward the latter.
For reference, maintainer duties include:
- Orienting new community members (who may have questions about Exosphere)
- Orienting new project contributors
- Triaging issues, prioritizing work, and defining the scope of changes
- Guiding the project to set and achieve goals
- Reviewing contributions for quality and correctness
- Resolving version control merge conflicts
- Deploying Exosphere to any production servers maintained by the upstream project
- If they can, attending regular project meetings