# \[Request for Comments\] Recommendations for FOSS Hack (and future) Partner Projects **URL:** \ **Category:** Organisation\ **Created:** [7 June 2024 12:12 UTC](https://forum.fossunited.org/t/request-for-comments-recommendations-for-foss-hack-and-future-partner-projects/3323 "2024-06-07T12:12:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![mriya11](https://forum.fossunited.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/90ced4/32.png) [@mriya11](https://forum.fossunited.org/u/mriya11)\ **Post date:** [7 June 2024 12:12 UTC](https://forum.fossunited.org/t/request-for-comments-recommendations-for-foss-hack-and-future-partner-projects/3323/1 "2024-06-07T12:12:05Z")
_These are a few recommendations for projects. This could be updated based on feedback and suggestions. Do add-on to this thread to propose._ * * * If you are interested in becoming a [Partner Project](https://forum.fossunited.org/t/partner-projects-programme) for FOSS Hack, and other future programs organized by FOSS United, we have the following expectations from you. We have organized the expectations into different levels with Level 0 being the least we expect from your project and Level N as exceeding our expectations. It includes suggestions to consider while curating issues as well, highlighted in level 1 and 2. ## Level 0 - **A valid FOSS or OSI license.** - **An active Issue board.** - **An active Discussion forum** - **Bandwidth of Maintainers** - For FOSSHack partner projects, it is encouraged to **add a `fosshack` label** to issues, to ensure easy visibility and filtering ## Level 1 - **Contributing guidelines.** - **A Code of Conduct.** - **Issues that contain sufficient information to ensure that they can easily be picked up by potential contributors.** ## Level 2 - **Setup and enforce coding standards for your project** - **Highlight low-hanging fruits** - **Documentation always comes last but it is one of the most important aspects of a FOSS project.** - **Contributions attributing to design can be considered too.** ## Level 3 **Dig deep and create issues that involve large-scale refactoring and/or big feature additions** FOSS projects usually work on the implicit assumption that new contributors work on low-hanging fruit for a large amount of time, after which the project maintainers give them enough mentorship and insight to be able to work on a large-scale refactoring of the project and/or introduce big feature additions. (Note that in our experiences, big feature additions almost always involve refactoring, to some extent.) This does not have to be the case. Skilled contributors who are looking for a weekend project that delivers significant value might be open to taking up a large-scale refactoring issue on a project that they are not at all familiar with. The refactoring might cause certain changes/additions in the codebase to become trivial whereas they were non-trivial earlier. ---
**Author:** ![mriya11](https://forum.fossunited.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/90ced4/32.png) [@mriya11](https://forum.fossunited.org/u/mriya11)\ **Post date:** [7 June 2024 12:25 UTC](https://forum.fossunited.org/t/request-for-comments-recommendations-for-foss-hack-and-future-partner-projects/3323/2 "2024-06-07T12:25:08Z")
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**Author:** ![rahulporuri](https://forum.fossunited.org/user_avatar/forum.fossunited.org/rahulporuri/32/565_2.png) [@rahulporuri](https://forum.fossunited.org/u/rahulporuri)\ **Post date:** [9 June 2024 13:40 UTC](https://forum.fossunited.org/t/request-for-comments-recommendations-for-foss-hack-and-future-partner-projects/3323/3 "2024-06-09T13:40:42Z")
> **[A Disorganized List of Maintainer Tasks](https://davidism.com/maintainer-notes/)** > > After I became a maintainer of Flask, I had to figure out a lot on my own. I didn't get an instruction manual. I know I won't have the same amount of time to... There are a number of interesting points on that post that might be valuable to new FOSS/COSS maintainers. An opinionated subset of what is mentioned in the post is > - Create issue and pull request templates > - Create issue forms instead of templates > - Moderate issues and discussions > - Create an editorconfig for consistent text editing > - Set up pre-commit, pick out hooks, keep them updated > - Chat, do you use Discord, Zulip, Matrix, IRC, a combination, a bridge? > - Answer questions on GitHub discussions, chat, Stack Overflow > - A website, release announcements, blog > - Turning questions and answers into documentation improvements. > - Documentation translations, keeping synchronized, finding and retaining translators > - Documentation versions links to current stable version > - Code of conduct baseline, moderation beyond that > - Maintaining the ecosystem beyond the core libraries, community maintained projects > - Template repository, make all projects use same layout, tools, and processes > - Improve test coverage, organization, style > - Improve PRs, rebase to retarget branch, squash work commits, fix changelog/docs style, add tests, etc. > - Automate release process, document manual process > - Keep up to date with Python changes, update tox/CI versions > - Keep up to date with tool/dependency changes > - License year is not needed/does not need to be updated > - Deprecations, warnings, removals, messaging about pinning versions and testing > - Supported versions policy, for bugs, for security, for Python, for dependencies > - Collecting and listing resources ---
**Author:** ![SphericalKat](https://forum.fossunited.org/user_avatar/forum.fossunited.org/sphericalkat/32/789_2.png) [@SphericalKat](https://forum.fossunited.org/u/SphericalKat)\ **Post date:** [11 June 2024 09:15 UTC](https://forum.fossunited.org/t/request-for-comments-recommendations-for-foss-hack-and-future-partner-projects/3323/4 "2024-06-11T09:15:19Z")
These points sound good to me. I think one thing that should definitely be mentioned is the time commitment for the maintainers; if they don’t have the time to onboard new contributors, it won’t help much being a partner project. ---
**Author:** ![mriya11](https://forum.fossunited.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/90ced4/32.png) [@mriya11](https://forum.fossunited.org/u/mriya11)\ **Post date:** [11 June 2024 09:41 UTC](https://forum.fossunited.org/t/request-for-comments-recommendations-for-foss-hack-and-future-partner-projects/3323/5 "2024-06-11T09:41:26Z")
This is helpful! Had mentioned it in a gist in the partner projects structure: > [@Partner Projects Programme](https://forum.fossunited.org/t/partner-projects-programme/3282/1): > > ## Expectations from maintainers > > 1. Look through proposal requests and assign issues to contributors > 2. Utilise the prep-phase to provide support to contributors, which could include: > - Providing an onboarding to the project. > - Helping to understand the codebase > - Resolving queries > > 3. Provide a forum to have discussions on general project queries.(issue specific can be done on issue discussions). > - Preferably GitHub discussions can be used. > - FOSS Hack Telegram group could also be used to make announcements about discussion calls if any etc. > > 4. Review PRs and merge them if significant to the project. > - The maintainers are allowed to suggest changes to the PR after submission to make them more efficient Will mention here too. > [@mriya11](#): > > **Bandwidth of Maintainers** > > It is important for the project maintainers to have time commitment to help onboard new contributors. In context of partner projects for FOSS Hack 2024, the expectations from maintainers are listed [here](https://forum.fossunited.org/t/partner-projects-programme/3282#expectations-from-maintainers-4). ---
**Author:** ![rahulporuri](https://forum.fossunited.org/user_avatar/forum.fossunited.org/rahulporuri/32/565_2.png) [@rahulporuri](https://forum.fossunited.org/u/rahulporuri)\ **Post date:** [28 June 2024 06:17 UTC](https://forum.fossunited.org/t/request-for-comments-recommendations-for-foss-hack-and-future-partner-projects/3323/6 "2024-06-28T06:17:17Z")
[GitHub - chanzuckerberg/czi-oss-training: Training Materials for Good Open Source Citizenship](https://github.com/chanzuckerberg/czi-oss-training) GitHub repository contains a lot of meaningful information and reference links that we should dig into when working on these recommendations.