GOVERNANCE.md

Roles and responsibilities

Kindly is maintained through volunteer work - all contributions are welcome and we look to invite new collaborators at all times. The roles described below are intended as guidelines for different ways to get involved and different levels of commitment you may choose to take on at any point.

How much you contribute and how long for is entirely at your discretion and collaborators can change their roles in the community in any way at any time that is relevant to them.

There are two simple steps to taking on any role:

• 🔨 Do the work involved.
  This community is run on willful collaboration, meaning we invite and expect everyone to identify the areas of Kindly they would like to help with and take any reasonable action towards improving the platform.

  • If you are interested in being a maintainer, find ways in which you can help maintainers with their tasks
  • If you see an opportunity to improve the performance of our code, publish an issue suggesting a spike or changes
  • you get the point...

• 🙋 Ask for any help needed.
  The codebase on Kindly is the result of a large community collaborating over time, so if there's something you're not sure about it's very likely that someone else will have an insight that can help.
  Be active in our discord server, share updates in your issues and if you would like to contribute in different ways let the core team know about your ideas

Collaborator

Everyone involved in maintaining / improving Kindly is considered a collaborator. All you need in order to be a collaborator is to get involved.

• Do
  Get familiar with the documentation on Kindly. Set up your local environment and try using the platform. Connect with the community on the Discord server and introduce yourself in the #start-here channel. Submit new issues if you spot an opportunity to improve Kindly by adding functionality of fixing a bug.

• Ask
  Shout out on Discord about anything that you would like to get involved with. Some Collaborators never contribute code but help us with UX/UI projects or user testing, or maybe you are interested/experienced in a particular kind of development work - find out how your skills match the needs of the community by reaching out to us on Discord.

Contributor

Contributors help us by closing issues in the backlog. The basic outline of the role consists of picking up issues, submitting code for them and successfully moving through a PR review to merge your code the staging environment (and eventually, production)

To become a Collaborator:

• Do
  Pick out issues from our backlog, making sure to follow the conventions and patterns established in the codebase. Submit a PR and follow up on any requested changes to successfully merge your code into dev

• Ask
  Reach out to the community on Discord to get clarification on any questions and share learnings with the other developers. Use the comments in our issues and PRs to get help and buy-in from other collaborators on any specific technical questions around your contributions

Maintainer

Maintainers help manage the repo itself and keep a level of consistency through all code contributions. They can approve Pull Requests or Request Changes, they can close issues if needed or assign new developers to them.

To become a Maintainer:

• Do
  Submit reviews for other developers Pull Requests. Keep in mind the conventions set in our code and suggest helpful ways to improve readability, maintainability and performance in our code. Look for ways to improve our documentation by adding more clarity around setup and governance or by simply documenting conventions or common patterns in the code that are not yet shown in the documentation.

• Ask
  For this role you will need to be given permissions to read/write to the repo and project board, so you will need to ask this directly of one of the members of the core team. You can easily find out who are the members of the core team in our Discord server.

  We will look for a few markers to make sure people wanting to help as Maintainers are comfortable with the code base and can help others get to the same point. These are general guidelines, but we will want to see that you:

  • have successfully merged 5 PRs since joining the community
  • have provided helpful feedback to others on their contributions

Core team

Members of the Core Team take part of regular catch up meetings with the Product Owner and have decision making power over the roadmap and repo management.

To be become a member of the Core Team:

• Do
  Follow the steps involved in taking on the roles above and be prepared to commit a significant amount of time to Kindly. We do not have mandatory time quotas, as this is a fully voluntary project, but joining the Core Team will most likely require the capacity to dedicate at least 10 weekly hours to it.

• Ask
  Let a member of the Core Team know that you are interested in helping out 🙂

Questions

I have some time now and would love to help as a maintainer, but I don't know if I can do it for very long. What should I do?

Collaborators can take on a new role at any point. If you would like to help as a Maintainer and have gone through the steps described above we'll be very grateful to take that help - and later on if being a Contributor is better suited for you then you can just do that instead. Just let us know when your capacity changes 🙂

I'm a Contributor and I'd love to do more but I'm not sure if I can be that helpful to other developers

That's exactly why we ask everyone to Do and Ask. The best way to find out how much you can help is by getting started. We've set up a lot of documentation and guidance and if you spot a necessity for more then you can always help by contributing with that. A lot of Collaborators in the community started off unsure of their code and ended up creating entire features and helping others debug and clean up their code.

How do I know who has what roles?

Pretty much by interacting. The roles are set up purely as guidelines and to encourage everyone to find a way to contribute that makes sense to them. There are no badges, rewards or honorary titles associated. If you need help just ask and someone in the community with the knowledge necessary will find your question.