Maintaining the Maintainers - Phil Estes, AWS

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Maintaining the Maintainers - Phil Estes, AWS

The goal of many open source projects is to reach a stable and mature state where users and maintainers continue to sustain project health over a period of years, or maybe decades! But if your project reaches this lofty goal, you will definitely live through the "working lifetime" of many of your maintainers and contributors. Some will retire, some will move to new roles with little time to contribute. Others may just lose interest and slowly fade from the project.

So how do we "maintain the maintainers" over the lifetime of our projects? In this talk we'll draw from lessons learned in containerd, a graduated CNCF project with a large set of contributors as well as other related projects. This will include practical guidance on governance as well as introducing emeritus status. We'll share general day to day guidance for maintainer interactions and talk about ideas for keeping contributors engaged and the importance of a pipeline of new contributors leading to new maintainers.