Maintainers

Maintainers play a crucial role in open source projects and serve as the backbone of the open source ecosystem, overseeing project development, managing contributions, and ensuring a project’s long-term health and sustainability. Explore maintainer spotlights that cover the responsibilities, challenges, and best practices associated with maintaining open source projects. Get insights into effective project management, communication strategies, and community building techniques that help maintainers create a welcoming and productive environment for contributors. By highlighting the experiences and lessons learned from seasoned maintainers, we shine a light on some of the most important people in the open source community—and offer their experiences as lessons for other open source developers. You can also find information in our documentation around how to build and foster sustainable open source communities.

Featured

Create a home for your community with GitHub Discussions

GitHub Community-in-a-box provides the tooling, resources, and knowledge you need to build internal communities of learning at scale with GitHub Discussions.

Keeping repository maintainer information accurate

Discover how keeping repository maintainer information accurate through CODEOWNERS files and automating maintenance with tools like cleanowners fosters efficient collaboration and sustainable software projects.

How to gain insight into your project contributors

We’re excited to share with you the contributors Action! At GitHub, we maintain several open source repositories and have developed this Action to empower maintainers to measure how many new and returning contributors and contributions have occurred over any given time period.

Metrics for issues, pull requests, and discussions

With the new Issue Metrics GitHub Action, you can now track and monitor important metrics related to issues, pull requests, and discussions, such as time to first response, time to close, and more!

Latest

(De)coding conventions

Navigating the ebb and flow of programming paradigms–from the shifts in the JavaScript ecosystem and TypeScript’s rise, to AI’s role in advancing accessibility, and strategies for encouraging non-code contributions–tune in to the latest episode of The ReadME Podcast for more.

Bridging code and community

Explore the impact of non-code contributions—and why they are often undervalued, the challenges of using open source in regulated environments, and the art of managing projects at the scale of Kubernetes, now on The ReadME Podcast.

Maintainer Month 2023: How the community gathered to spread some maintainer love

Maintainer Month is a time for open source maintainers to gather, share, and be celebrated. Over 31 days, 16 organizations came together to offer 42 activities convening and celebrating maintainers.

Announcing the Stale Repos Action

A tool to help you keep your open source catalog organized and up to date.

Elevating open source contributors to open source maintainers

Experts explain how to recruit and onboard co-maintainers.

Kelsey Hightower on leadership in open source and the future of Kubernetes

In this special episode of The ReadME Podcast, dedicated to GitHub’s Maintainer Month, Kelsey Hightower joins hosts Martin Woodward and Neha Batra to discuss his philosophy on fostering thriving open source communities and the importance of empathy to a maintainer’s success.