Current state of finding new maintainers

Hello everyone. About five months ago Agate wrote a blog post explaining that Funkwhale searches for new maintainers as she steps down for personal reasons.

Since then, some things happened. Lately we realized there was not enough transparency about the process and a update is needed. Thats the motivation for this post.

I used the term “we” in the previous paragraph and this is probably the point, where this update should start. Who are we? My name is Georg, I am actually quite new to this great community. My instance was started in May 2020. Since I was using mopidy before my first contributions were made for the mopidy plugin. When I saw the mentioned blog post, I stepped up for maintaining this plugin. Some people gathered together in a maintainers chat room to coordinate the work on the whole project. When I entered this room in February, it was quite silent. There already were some contributions from several people merged into the develop branch and a release was needed to ship them. So we worked towards a 1.1 release, published an release candidate, fixed some bugs and the first release made by the community was there \o/

While I did some coordination, a lot of work was done by others: We had a bunch of contributors (See the Changelog), petitminion helps with managing the issues, mjourdan works on concepts to improve the design of the Funkwhale interface and reviews changes if they are a step in the right direction. Agate is still there for answering questions while Ginny moderated open.audio and was available to handle any case of abuse. Additionally we had a lot of users reporting issues and help to debug them.

By getting deeper into the project I noticed there are still a lot of responsibilities for Agate. The project was raised by her and thats a natural thing, but still a burden for her and sometimes a brake when she is not available. A huge task was the maintaince of our self hosted systems: Our project management, our forum and a lot of other services. Luckyly @egon0 stepped up to care for our infrastructure in the future. This takes another load from Agate.

So lets sum this up. As a reminder, here is the list of tasks collected by Agate in November 2020.

1. Building a roadmap
2. Implementing roadmap items (new features)
3. Implementing day-to-day bugfixes and enhancements
4. Publishing new releases
5. Providing support to pod admins and users
6. Maintaining the Funkwhale infrastructure and services (servers, GitLab, Blog, Forums, etc.)
7. Maintaining and moderating open.audio
8. Communicating around the project and our blog and social media
9. Triage, answer and prioritize issues on the issue tracker

As mentioned above, petitminion covers point 9., egon0 handles 6., while I take care of publishing releases, supporting users and admins and hunting bugs. Some points are still not covered. I wish I could spend more time to work on Funkwhale and implement new features, but this is not going to work for me this year. Additionally there are points 7 and 8. Especially moderation and handling of abuses are important tasks.

Agate will continue to be around to answer questions about the existing processes, organization, infrastructure and codebase, but plans to slowly move to other horizons.

If you are interested in helping out there, please get in touch! :)

~Georg