2026-06-18 Contributor Experience Working Group

OpenStack’s contributor base has narrowed over the past decade, even as the project’s deployment footprint has grown. The community’s mechanisms for recognizing non-code contributions, onboarding new contributors, and tracking community health have not kept pace. The Active Contributor exception process sees negligible use outside of the i18n SIG, despite its intent to recognize bug triagers, documentation writers, event organizers, and others whose work does not produce commits in repositories. The First Contact SIG has not had sustained activity in several years. The Upstream Institute has not held training sessions since 2020. No single entity within OpenStack’s governance is responsible for the end-to-end contributor experience.

The OpenStack Technical Committee establishes a Contributor Experience Working Group (CEWG) as a TC working group with a mandate to improve the contributor experience across the OpenStack community. The working group is delegated authority over three areas:

Contributor Recognition

Making non-code contributions visible and ensuring that the people that contribute to the OpenStack community in ways including and beyond writing code are recognized within the project’s governance.

Community Health

Understanding the state of OpenStack’s contributor base: who contributes, in what roles, how retention and responsiveness are trending, and where the community’s capacity is concentrated or at risk.

Contributor Onboarding

Owning the strategy for how new contributors find their way into the project, absorbing the mission of the First Contact SIG. The working group will propose the formal archival of the First Contact SIG as a separate governance change. If the Upstream Institute is revived, the CEWG will serve as its governance home.

The working group does not have authority to modify the TC charter. Any changes to AC definitions or election rules require the normal charter amendment process. The working group does not own code repositories, CI infrastructure, or release processes; those belong to project teams and the TaCT SIG. The CEWG will coordinate with the Election working group to propose any changes that affect voter eligibility.

Membership and Operations

The working group shall have a minimum of three members, at least one of whom must be a current TC member. Members serve for one release cycle and may volunteer to continue. The working group will operate on the openstack-discuss mailing list using the [contributor-experience] subject tag and will provide status updates at TC meetings frequently.

If the working group cannot maintain its minimum membership for two consecutive cycles, the TC will dissolve it or redistribute its responsibilities.