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Empowering non-code contributors

· 2 min read
Jorge O. Castro
Jorge O. Castro
Developer Relations

One of the nicest things about being in the CNCF is projects can generate their own governance. Our layperson description for how CNCF governance works is typically "Do what you say you do on the tin."

Have your Governance Match your Community​

CNCF maintainers are Founders, CTO, CEO, Marketing, Tech Lead, VP Sales, HR, and every title under the book. The CNCF constantly bombards you with project opportunities: booths, slots for talks, etc. All of this can be overwhelming to maintainers.

Feel free to expand your governance where it fits. Today's example is to expand a typical boring CODEOWNERS file to empower folks.

First off is something I find myself reminding projects constantly: Your governance is yours to adapt! You can add a few simple lines to your existing documentation to bring in people:

Check out how bootc does it

Defined non-code contributors in MAINTAINERS.md

Examples: CNCF Service Desk tickets, coordinating with CNCF Project and Events teams, and LFX Administration. No code or code review rights.

We're so used to the files in our repositories being only relegated to the code!

It's about trust​

There are five global KubeCons and tons of KCDs - scaling this at the contributor level is difficult, which is why decoupling it from the code is a nice hack.

This lets you pull in those community managers, project and product managers - they bring in those crucial skills that we all need. And when they are declared in your governance as Contributors it shows that the project is looking at its contributor ladder as a whole.

Thanks to Kapil Thangavelu who showed me this little word hack at Cloud Custodian.

Git is our source of truth​

The CNCF staff use the files that you put in git as THE source of truth. It determines your event resources, everything. It never hurts to check the list for correctness, it should reflect the state of your project. (Note: the GitHub webui struggles with this file, you need to check it out of the repo or use raw mode).