Maintainer's Guide

To support maintainers running Hyperledger projects and labs, we have started a series of maintainer orientation calls to share resources and answer questions.  We will take the discussions from these calls and build out a maintainer's guide that will make this information easily available as a reference.

Maintainer Orientation Calls

• Thursday, November 4 at 8:00 AM pacific: How to create a Hyperledger Lab, Incubation Project or Graduated Project and planning for the next Maintainer Summit
  
  • Recording: https://zoom.us/rec/share/dFVO51rbGLU2jZzR6fv7Gq9j11tWTcWuzb9i_2LaVWnNdYBGvX70iumwdu6nysMg.tRTsl8kGfSqJKjTX
    
  • Agenda: A review of recent changes to the Project Lifecycle process and discussion of how to start and propose labs and projects and discussion of what people would like to see in next Maintainer Summit
    
    • Project Lifecycle
    • Process to propose a new lab

    • Project Incubation Entry Considerations

    • Project Incubation Exit Criteria

• Thursday, June 24 at 8:00 AM pacific: How to get more contributors for your Hyperledger project or lab
  • Recording: https://wiki.hyperledger.org/download/attachments/54657383/24%20JUN%202021.mp4?api=v2
    
  • Agenda: Discussion of main topic and then an AMA to address any questions from maintainers
  • Resources:
    • Review of recent design work on the wiki
      • Updates to Cactus wiki page and using it as a template for other pages (compare to version of page before the design work)
      • Updates to main wiki page to make content easier to digest and add dynamic content with recent activities embedded from https://start-here.hyperledger.org/
        
    • Review of ways you can connect with potential contributors
      • Raising the Profile of Your Hyperledger Lab (also relevant for Projects and we can create a Project specific version that would have a few changes in it)

• Thursday, April 22 at 8:00 AM pacific: How to find community metrics for your project
  • Agenda: Discussion of main topic and then a discussion of setting up regular maintainer orientation calls
  • Resources:
    • Hyperledger Insights dashboard
    • Webinar about Insights dashboard

Topics to cover in upcoming calls

Feel free to add topic ideas that we can cover in upcoming maintainer orientation calls.  And if there are specific topics that are already here that you're particularly interested in, feel free to edit the page and add +1 to any topic or leave a note in the comments.

• How can I recognize the contributors of my Hyperledger project?
• How can I collaborate more with other Hyperledger projects?
• How can I translate material for my Hyperledger project into other languages?
• How can I make my Hyperledger project more inclusive and diverse?
  • Note the DCIWG is working on content for the guide at: Developer Guide Outline/Draft
• How can I raise the visibility of my Hyperledger project to find more users?
• What obligations do maintainers have?
• What tools are available to me to maintain my project?
• How else can we help you with your 2021 goals for your Hyperledger project?

• Guide/tutorial links for those that are not confident enough with their git fu to wrangle multiple conflicting branches without turning their commit graph into a merge-spaghetti

• Practical "pro" tip: Take cues from other projects. Or in other words, just shamelessly copy the boilerplate stuff.

  • Chances are, if you see a CONTRIBUTING.md file like the Cactus one, you'll be able to re-purpose it to fit your exact needs in less effort than writing one from scratch (and the other projects have great CONTRIBUTING.md files too, but I'm shamelessly self-plugging).

  • This also applies to even just figuring out what boilerplate documentation you need to begin with (repo linter might make this easy in the future but until then the simplest is to just get inspired by the existing projects and see what kind of documents they have in their root folder)
• Mention the CII best practices checks, it is super easy to go through the list of items it gives you as lacking on the project and it goes a long way (to me at least) if you are compliant.
• "Pro" tip: Github Actions are awesome, even with the recent outages, I highly recommend to every maintainer setting it up, it takes 5 minutes as long as your project has a build script that works. I'm also happy to volunteer to field questions about this if someone has any about the syntax or anything else. And of course, the other pro tip about copying from other projects stands here as well.
• Would also include some generic OSS project maintainer guides links that aren't specific to HL but would apply, nevertheless.