MeltanoLabs Community Contributions and Incentives

[pnadolny13]

We want more community members to contribute to MeltanoLabs so we can scale up our quality and maintenance of these connectors. I see MeltanoLabs as a sub-community under the Meltano umbrella, which may or may not have overlap with core Meltano, so we should communicate and foster it somewhat independently. I propose that we do the following things to stir up more energy:

1. Define owners and contributors for each connector. Maybe in the Meta README. By doing this we can be explicit about who the maintainers are and point out gaps where we could use some volunteers to step up. Also long term having this defined in the README will be a good notification to everyone when ownership changes.
2. Leverage the labs slack channel better. It would be awesome if we could put all core MeltanoLabs contributors in that channel so we have a way to communicate directly with that sub-community. We don't need the whole Meltano community to hear about requests for an MR review for a specific connector. The goal is that this can be a place where we can talk specifically about the connectors that live in MeltanoLabs or are being proposed to be added.
3. MeltanoLabs floater contributors. On top of having defined ownership of connectors we should also encourage a group of floater contributors who aren't committing to any one connector but are well versed in Singer and the SDK. We should be able to call on this group when we have PRs that need review (like this tap-gitlab request in slack) or repos that don't have owners and are looking for volunteers. I imagine a good chunk of people will prefer to be in this bucket.
4. Incentives and credit for contributing. I think having owner names defined in the README is an incentive as a credibility/resume builder. Regularly giving shoutouts and updates about who has been contributing to MeltanoLabs can be enough for some people to get excited to contribute. Maybe MeltanoLabs role specific swag for subcommunities (maintainer, floater, contributor, etc.)? A MeltanoLabs subpage on the website with peoples names and Github links? Something else?

I'd like to see us agree on these things and announce them to the community so we can stir up more energy to contribute.

What does everyone think about this? Definitely open to suggestions and changes but I was thinking about this stuff a lot and just wanted to get the discussion started.

[tayloramurphy]

@pnadolny13 thanks for opening this! I like all of these suggestions.

For your first two suggestions, I think we can definitely do that and indicate their Slack handle on Meltano Slack too. Updating the readme to indicate the Slack channel would be great as well.

For point 3 I think it'd be about having a GitHub team that folks could be a part of. Managing and checking in on it would fall under @afolson's purview I assume? Same for point 4.

Overall I like it and think we should start right away with points 1 and 2!

[pnadolny13]

@tayloramurphy awesome - I created a few issues for 1 and 2.

For point 3 if we like this idea then I'd want to have some documentation for adding someone to a team and what the team breakdowns are. I left a TODO in the README for this section. I know we figured out the Ovio co-ownership team settings last week so that would be good to document while its fresh.

@afolson what do you think about points 3 and 4?