Keynote: Building a Sustainable CNCF Project Contributor Base

The talk discusses ways to build a sustainable contributor base for CNCF projects and prevent maintainer burnout.

• Maintaining an open source project is hard work and can lead to maintainer burnout.
• Proactive and specific requests for help can motivate contributors.
• Moving people into Emeritus roles can recognize their hard work and allow them to step away from day-to-day responsibilities.
• Developing a sustainable contributor growth strategy involves onboarding new contributors, promoting them into leadership positions, and getting help with different types of contributions.
• Breaking out of the vicious cycle of fewer contributors and less time for onboarding requires strategic thinking about where to start.
• The CNCF has resources and templates available to help build a sustainable contributor base.
• The talk encourages carving out one hour a week to improve onboarding docs, contribution guides, project governance, or helping others learn something new.

The speaker shares her own experience of being asked by Paris Pittman to write a guide for the tag about measuring project health, which made her feel recognized and motivated to contribute.

Maintaining an open source project is hard work that often extends out over several years, and maintainer burnout is common within open source projects. It can be hard for already overworked maintainers to balance the day to day work required to keep the project running while also investing in additional activity to increase future sustainability. The good news is that the CNCF has best practices, resources, guides, and templates available to make it easier for you to build a contributor strategy that leads to becoming a sustainable CNCF project over the long term. This talk will help you apply those resources in your project. This talk will include:Major factors that impact project sustainability. Developing and executing on a sustainable contributor growth strategy, including governance, new contributor onboarding, and mentoring. Using contributor ladders to promote contributors into leadership positions as more maintainers to share the workload can reduce maintainer burnout over time.The audience will walk away with a better understanding of how to grow their contributor base and build a sustainable community around their CNCF project.