Maintainer responsibilities

This document provides guidance for:

• Contributors to collections who want to join maintainer teams.
• Collection maintainers seeking to understand their roles better.

This document defines the role of an Ansible collection maintainer, outlines their responsibilities, and describes the process for becoming one.

Collection maintainer definition

An Ansible collection maintainer, or simply maintainer, is a contributor who:

• Makes significant and regular contributions to a project.
• Demonstrates expertise in the area the collection automates.
• Earns the community's trust. To fulfill their duties, maintainers have write or higher access to the collection.

Maintainer responsibilities

Collection maintainers perform the following tasks:

• Act in accordance with the code_of_conduct.
• Subscribe to the repository they maintain. In GitHub, click Watch > All activity.
• Keep the README, development guidelines, and other general maintainer_documentation current.
• Review and commit changes from other contributors using the review_checklist.
• Backport <Backporting> changes to stable branches.
• Plan and perform releases <Releasing>.
• Ensure the collection adheres to the collections_requirements.
• Track changes announced through the news-for-maintainers forum tag. Click the Bell button to subscribe. Update the collection accordingly.
• Build a healthy community <expanding_community> to increase the number of active contributors and maintainers for collections.

Multiple maintainers can divide these responsibilities among themselves.

Becoming a maintainer

If you are interested in becoming a maintainer and meet the requirements<maintainer_requirements>, nominate yourself. You can also nominate another person by following these steps:

1. Create a GitHub issue in the relevant repository.
2. If you receive no response, message the Red Hat Ansible Community Engineering Team on the Ansible forum.

Communicating as a maintainer

Maintainers communicate with the community through the channels listed in the Ansible communication guide<communication>.

Establishing working group communication

Working groups rely on efficient communication. As a maintainer, you can establish communication for your working groups using these techniques:

• Find and join an existing forum group and use tags that suit your project.
  • If no suitable options exist, request them.
• Provide working group details and chat room links in the contributor section of your project's README.md.
• Encourage contributors to join the forum group and use appropriate tags.

Participating in community topics

The Community and the Steering Committee <steering_responsibilities> discuss and vote on community topics<creating_community_topic> asynchronously. These topics impact the entire project or its components, including collections and packaging.

Share your opinion and vote on the topics to help the community make informed decisions.

Expanding the collection community

You can expand the community around your collection in the following ways:

• Explicitly state in your README that the collection welcomes new maintainers and contributors.
• Give newcomers a positive first experience <collection_new_contributors>.
• Invite contributors to join forum groups and subscribe to tags related to your project.
• Maintain good documentation <maintainer_documentation> with guidelines for new contributors.
• Make people feel welcome personally and individually. Greet and thank them.
• Use labels to identify easy fixes and leave non-critical easy fixes to newcomers.
• Offer help explicitly.
• Include quick ways contributors can help and provide contributor documentation references in your README.
• Be responsive in issues, pull requests (PRs), and other communication channels.
• Conduct PR days regularly.
• Maintain a zero-tolerance policy toward behavior that violates the code_of_conduct.
  • Include information about how people can report code of conduct violations in your README and CONTRIBUTING files.
• Look for new maintainers among active contributors.

Maintaining good collection documentation

Ensure the collection documentation meets these criteria:

• It is up-to-date.
• It matches the style_guide.
• Collection module and plugin documentation adheres to the Ansible documentation format <module_documenting>.
• Collection user guides follow the Collection documentation format <collections_doc_dir>.
• Repository files include at least a README and CONTRIBUTING file.
• The README file contains all sections from collection_template/README.md.
• The CONTRIBUTING file includes all details or links to details on how new or continuing contributors can contribute to your collection.