Duties of Maintainers
Maintainers are responsible for the technical and community health of a CNCF project. Duties vary by project size and maturity, but the core expectations are consistent.
Core Responsibilities
Technical stewardship
- Review and merge changes according to project standards.
- Protect release quality, security posture, and compatibility.
- Ensure changes are documented and discoverable.
Community stewardship
- Keep contribution pathways clear for new and returning contributors.
- Model respectful communication and enforce the code of conduct.
- Encourage distributed ownership to avoid maintainer concentration risk.
Governance stewardship
- Keep governance and maintainer-role docs accurate.
- Follow documented decision processes.
- Ensure maintainer lifecycle transitions are explicit and recorded.
Recommended Operating Cadence
Weekly
- Triage new issues and pull requests.
- Review and unblock active contributions.
- Confirm community questions receive follow-up.
Monthly
- Review contributor activity and onboarding outcomes.
- Review release and roadmap status.
- Evaluate maintainer workload distribution.
Quarterly
- Review governance docs and role accuracy.
- Assess maintainer coverage and succession planning.
- Review project health indicators and set improvement actions.
What Good Looks Like
- Contributors understand how to propose, discuss, and ship changes.
- No single maintainer is a blocking dependency for routine project work.
- Project norms are written down and followed in public.
- Leadership transitions can happen without disruption.