Absolutely everyone is welcome to join our community at any time! We are a friendly and inclusive group and we’d love to have you. We have three roles in the Athens community:
Read on to find out more!
Community members are folks who decide they want to get involved with our community. Absolutely anyone can do that whenever they want. If you want to get involved, that doesn’t mean you have to commit to being involved, but we hope our community is welcoming and the work is interesting enough to convince you to stay :)
We’ll provide all the support we can possibly provide to help you contribute in any way you’d like. If you’re considering joining us, here are some ideas for how you can get involved:
#athens channelAs you participate in the community more and more, you’ll have the opportunity to become a contributor. Here’s what being a contributor means, and what you should do to become one.
Contributors have read access to the Athens repository on Github. This means that as a contributor, you’re able to have issues assigned to you and you’ll be requested to review pull requests (PRs) via the Github pull request review system.
We rely heavily on the Github PR review system, which means that if you review a PR as a contributor, you can help decide when that PR is ready to be merged. Don’t worry that you don’t know enough, the final approval and merge will be by one or more maintainers.
To become a contributor, the core maintainers of the project would like to see you:
Contributors and maintainers will do their best to watch for community members who may make good contributors. But don’t be shy, if you feel that this is you, please reach out to one or more of the contributors or maintainers.
After you become a contributor, you’ll have the opportunity to become a maintainer. Here’s what being a maintainer means and how to become one.
Note: We sometimes refer to maintainers as “core maintainers,” but they’re the same thing.
As a maintainer, you’ll be doing the same things as a contributor with a few extras:
To become a maintainer, we would like you to see you be an effective contributor, and show that you can do some of the things maintainers do. Maintainers will do their best to regularly discuss promoting contributors. But don’t be shy, if you feel that this is you, please reach out to one or more of the maintainers.
The above descriptions lay out roughly what each role is and how you can move into each of them. Folks all have different strengths, live in different places, and so on. We’re a diverse group, and we want to keep it that way!
So, everything in this document is a guideline, not a hard-and-fast rule. If you are really good at something, or can’t do something else, talk to one of the maintainers and let us know what’s up. We will accommodate everyone the best we can.
1 Athens development meetings are during the day in US Pacific Time.
We know that this time can be problematic for some folks due to work commitments,
different time zones, and so on. If you can't come to meetings, that's totally ok
and doesn't mean you can't become a contributor! Just let one of the maintainers
know about it, or leave a message in #athens in the gophers slack.
2 Anyone and everyone is of course welcome to do this too!