RFC: Contributor Experience Workgroup Charter

Hello, fellow enthusiasts!

The folks mentioned below have been working on a charter for a new Swift Contributor Experience Workgroup proposal. Our ad-hoc workgroup spun out of pushing Diversity in Swift throughout the project leadership to focus on supporting newcomers and seasoned contributors to the Swift project, provide pathways for contributing, improving contributing workflows, etc. This workgroup has already become the organizer for the Swift Mentorship Program.

Below is the draft charter. Please let us know your thoughts, questions, and other feedback!

- Holly and Anthony


Contributor Experience Workgroup

The Contributor Experience Workgroup supports contributors to the Swift project, including contributions on the Swift forums.

Charter

The Contributor Experience Workgroup will

  • improve the mechanics of contributing to the Swift compiler and related open source repositories by
    • providing guidance and setting expectations for the GitHub pull request, issue reporting and code review workflows
    • improving “getting started” documentation
    • adding and managing GitHub labels
  • provide support systems and facilitate collaboration amongst contributors through
    • the Swift Mentorship Program
    • community groups
    • open source collaboration tools
    • other technical spaces to connect with other contributors

Fostering an inclusive community is critical to ensure that everybody in the Swift community feels enabled and empowered to make contributions to the Swift project. The Contributor Experience Workgroup will work with the Diversity in Swift Workgroup to

  • surface pathways for making contributions
  • lower the barrier to entry for participating in the Swift project
  • provide diverse opportunities for seasoned contributors to exercise their leadership and expertise
  • facilitate participation of the other workgroups in these I&D efforts such as the Swift Mentorship Program

Members of the workgroup serve at the discretion of the Swift Core Team and the Swift project lead, who has the ultimate authority over the workgroup decisions.

Membership

Members of the workgroup are volunteers working towards improving the contributor experience. If you are interested in joining the workgroup, please send a message to @contributor-workgroup on the Swift forums, and mention why you’re interested in joining and how you envision supporting contributors to the Swift project!

To facilitate turnover within the workgroup, there will be an annual check-in for workgroup participation to provide an opportunity to step down from the workgroup, and a Call for Participation for new people to join will be posted on the Swift forums.

The current workgroup members with their respective Swift forums usernames:

Communication

The Contributor Experience Workgroup communicates with the broader Swift community using the Development forum for general discussions and questions about the contributor experience. The workgroup can be reached privately on the Swift Forums by messaging @contributor-workgroup.

Community Participation

Every individual contribution is appreciated and is not just limited to submitting pull requests. If you’d like to contribute, consider

  • participating in discussions on the Swift forums
  • reporting or triaging GitHub issues
  • providing feedback on your own experience contributing to the Swift project
  • volunteering as a mentor for the Swift Mentorship Program, which is now available all year round for short-term mentorship.
23 Likes

CODE_OWNERS.TXT could be transferred to .github/CODEOWNERS, by someone familiar with the current project members and structure. This would help new contributors, by automatically requesting code reviews, but I don't know if it would also apply to existing pull requests?
(is:pr is:open -is:draft has 409 results.)

2 Likes

That is indeed something that is being discussed as a part of a more comprehensive approach to improve contribution experience.

4 Likes