OpenTelemetry Contributor Experience SIG

What is the Contributor Experience SIG?

The goal of this SIG is to improve the experience of contributors to the OpenTelemetry Project. To achieve this, we create programs and processes around key contribution stages, such as first commit, or the transition from regular contributor to approver. We also consult with other SIGs to feedback into the process with an aim to improve overall community health.

Get involved

There are many ways to get involved:

• Create issues, comment on existing issues, or review pull requests.
• Get in touch with us on the CNCF slack channel #otel-contributor-experience.
• Attend one of our meetings. We alternate between two times to make it possible for you to join no matter which time zone you live or work in!

[!NOTE] This SIG operates async by default, so attending meetings is not mandatory! Feel free to choose your preferred way of communication.

How we organize the SIG work

A significant amount of issues in the Contributor Experience SIG require brainstorming between multiple contributors, possibly over a long time. This is particularly the case during the initial stage of this SIG. We will follow the steps below for such issues until February 2024.

To ensure that we can make steady progress and maintain focus on a small number of issues at a time, we try to figure out staffing for individual issues. At any time, pick a maximum of two issues and assign yourself to them. If you don't have permissions to do it, comment on the issue or bring it up in one of our meetings so that a maintainer can assign you.

To decide what issues to pick, prioritize issues with more existing assignees and upvotes, and come to the SIG meeting to discuss.

Once an issue has 3 or more assignees, we will start working on it. We signal this by moving it to "In Progress" in our project board. The first step may be to break issues down into sub-tasks to ensure the scope is not too broad. We don't have to complete an issue fully in order to move on to another task; we may decide to close or put an issue on hold and move to work on something else.

If there is an issue that requires little discussion and can be worked on by an individual person contributors are encouraged to work on it themselves even if not following the process above.