Maintainers and Reviewers on GitHub

Prerequisites

Prerequisite	Importance
Experience with version control	Helpful

Summary

For any open source project, one of the most challenging tasks for a new contributor is to identify ways to get involved by making online contributions to propose appropriate changes. Contribution guidelines of open source projects outline how community members can make such a contribution, but they often do not explain how one can contribute to the project by becoming a project maintainer. Dedicated project maintainers from the project’s core team or volunteer community often take up the role of supporting such contributions by other contributors.

Fig. 127 The Turing Way project illustration by Scriberia. Used under a CC-BY 4.0 licence. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3332807.

This subchapter sheds light on the role and tasks of such project maintainers who manage or coordinate community discussions, mentor contributions, support resource development, help in issue triaging, and review Pull Requests or PRs on an online collaborative GitHub project. It also provides the best practices to be used while contributing to a project as a maintainer.

This subchapter covers:

This chapter will be particularly useful for the community members who want to provide support in maintenance and review work in The Turing Way repository and or similar projects online.

The Git workflow is difficult to understand, especially when collaborating with a group of contributors for a project. Hence, this chapter aims to guide the review processes so that all the contributions made on a GitHub project are regularly and properly done.

This subchapter does not cover:

Please note that it is not a “how-to” guide to how to make contributions but lists the major responsibilities of a project maintainer and how these responsibilities should ideally be carried out when working in online and collaborative projects.