Communicating with Other Maintainers

Last updated on 2024-02-22 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 10 minutes

Overview

Questions

  • How do I get in touch with other Maintainers?
  • What resources exist for supporting me in this role?

Objectives

  • Join the appropriate communication channels to stay connected with fellow Maintainers.
  • Know how to get in touch with others in The Carpentries who support Maintainers.
  • Add Maintainer meetings to your calendar.

Synchronous communications

Maintainer meetings

We meet virtually on the third Wednesday of each month at two different time slots. We will take time together to add these meetings to your calendar in a moment.

Our monthly Maintainer meetings are an excellent place to connect with the broader Maintainer community, engage in discussions around topics of interest to Maintainers (including open Requests for Comment (RFCs)), and stay informed about upcoming work by other parts of The Carpentries community that may impact lesson maintenance.

We recognize that not everyone can attend these monthly meetings, and so also communicate important information through our main TopicBox and Slack channels. So don’t worry if you can’t attend! We do strongly encourage joining from time to time, though, as it’s a good way to get to know other Maintainers.

Add to Your Calendar (5 minutes)

Add the monthly Maintainer meetings to your calendar by either

  • subscribing to The Carpentries community calendar and copying events to your Google Calendar, or
  • clicking the TimeandDate links on the Maintainers CodiMD pad to convert the events to your local time, and adding to your calendar manually.

If you are planning to attend the upcoming meeting, add your name to the CodiMD pad to let us know you will be there!

In addition to these monthly opportunities to connect across the broad Maintainer community, you are encouraged to set up regular check-ins with the co-Maintainers for your lesson. The next section will provide more information about how to stay in touch with both the overall Maintainer community and your co-Maintainers.

Asynchronous communications

Because we are a globally distributed group, the vast majority of our work is done asynchronously. There are three primary asynchronous communication channels shared across the Maintainer team.

TopicBox

The Maintainers TopicBox list is used primarily for announcements relevant to the full Maintainer team, including reminders about upcoming meetings. Posts from individual Maintainers asking questions or introducing topics for discussion are extremely welcome, but our Slack channel is a more active place for back-and-forth discussion.

A few lists exist around specific curricula (search for lists starting with curriculum, but most have not been very active. If you would like to have a public TopicBox list created for discussions of your lesson, or a private list for your Maintainer team, please let us know.

Slack

To be added to our private Maintainers channel on Slack, you will need to join The Carpentries organisation. Our general Maintainers channel is a good place to ask questions of the full Maintainer team, or request input on specific issues and PRs. Most curricula also have a public Slack channel for discussing issues with the community (browse for channels starting with dc, lc, or swc). Specific curriculum channels have not historically been very active, but we encourage any efforts to increase interaction with the community on these channels. You can also use curriculum-specific channels for communicating with your co-Maintainers, or you can create a private channel for yourself and your co-Maintainers. If you would like a private channel to be created for you, please let us know.

GitHub

The majority of day-to-day interactions with your co-Maintainers will be on GitHub. You will need to be subscribed to (“watching”) your lesson repository to get email alerts about new issues, PRs, and other activity on your lesson. You can @ mention an individual Maintainer, your lesson team, and / or your Curriculum Advisory Committee to ensure that the appropriate person sees your message. Feel free also to @ The Carpentries Curriculum Team (Toby Hodges or Erin Becker) using @staff-curriculum and the Maintainer Community Lead (@ndporter).

Tagging in your Lesson Team

Each group of Maintainers is associated with a GitHub team. After you have completed this onboarding, you will be added to the appropriate Maintainer team. You will then be able to find the name of your team below:

Tagging in the Curriculum Team

To tag in the curriculum team on any repository hosted in one of the official lesson program GitHub organisations (Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry, Software Carpentry), use @staff-curriculum. On The Carpentries GitHub org, the team name is @core-team-curriculum. We are working on reconciling team names across GitHub organisations.

We also highly recommend subscribing to the Maintainer RFC (request for comments) repository. This repository is the primary platform for discussion and feedback from the Maintainer community on issues affecting Maintainers as a whole. We try to remember to announce new RFCs on TopicBox and Slack, but staying subscribed here will allow you to see others’ comments as they come in. To leave your feedback on an existing RFC, go to Issues and leave a comment. We also discuss RFCs at monthly Maintainer meetings to allow for a more nuanced back-and-forth conversation.

General Carpentries News

Subscribing to these channels will ensure you are up to date on issues affecting your lesson and lesson maintenance in general. To have a broader overview of all the exciting activity going on in The Carpentries community, we recommend subscribing to one or more of the following channels:

If you would really like to keep up to date on everything that is happening, The Carpentries maintains a variety of mailing lists on TopicBox and over 100 Slack channels, including spaces dedicated to discussion of particular curricula, connecting local and regional groups, and job opportunities.

Subscribe! (5 minutes)

That’s a lot of communication channels! You don’t need to subscribe to everything. The list below summarizes which channels are required and which are highly recommended.

Required

Highly Recommended

Take a few minutes to subscribe to the above channels. Write “done” in the Etherpad.

Introduce Yourself (2 minutes)

While folks are working on subscribing to the channels above, I will add you to the private Maintainers Slack channel. Please introduce yourself on that channel, including what lesson you will be maintaining.

Maintainer Capacity

Signing on as a Maintainer is not a lifelong commitment! The Carpentries recognises that this is a volunteer role and is committed to supporting your mental and emotional health. You are always free to step down from the Maintainer role, either permanently or to take a break. If you plan to take a short break (a couple of weeks), please let your co-Maintainers know. For longer breaks (a few months or longer), or if you would like to step down permanently, please notify the Curriculum Team by emailing team@carpentries.org so we can find someone else to support the lesson.

This also applies in reverse! If you are not able to get in touch with at least one other Maintainer for your lesson, please get in touch with the Curriculum Team. We may need to find more Maintainers to support the lesson.

Key Points

  • The Maintainer community communicates on TopicBox, Slack, and GitHub.
  • The Maintainer community meets monthly.