files/en-us/mdn/community/roles_teams/index.md
The success and growth of the MDN Web Docs project is, in large part, due to our community of contributors. Some contributors have committed a portion of their time to assist with the daily tasks of running MDN Web Docs. Changes to the site, including maintenance tasks, are performed by employees, contractors, and a network of partners who are all dedicated to the health, growth, and maintenance of MDN Web Docs. The project relies heavily on roles and teams in the MDN organization on GitHub to manage and incorporate changes from these different groups. A list of the organization's current members can be found at github.com/orgs/mdn.
Community contributions help this open source project immensely. Contributors can use their work on MDN Web Docs to show their writing, technical, and collaboration skills, and the ability to work with people from diverse backgrounds. This section describes the roles you can take on while volunteering on the MDN Web Docs project.
In the MDN Web Docs project, you can take on the role of a contributor, an organization member, a maintainer, or an owner. The progression from one role to the next is a step-by-step journey. With the advancement in your responsibilities, you could serve more than one role at the same time. Roles such as invited expert can be directly obtained if you've demonstrated expertise in a particular area.
Irrespective of the role you take on in this project, you are always a contributor. A contributor is the base role and all other roles are built on top of it. So while working on this project in any capacity, you must satisfy the requirements of the contributor role.
Contributors, or community participants, add to the project with their time, skills, opinions, and ideas. Contributors work on the project directly and add value to it. Apart from writing and testing code, contributions include creating and updating documentation, researching, fixing bugs, and helping other community members.
Depending on the frequency of your contributions, you can be someone who contributes occasionally or an active contributor. If you demonstrate a large impact on the project, you may be nominated as a spotlight contributor or be promoted to an organization member.
If you're new here and you would like to become a contributor, take a look at our Getting started guide and the repositories in the MDN GitHub organization.
As a contributor, you can get involved with the project by engaging in the following activities:
content repository) by submitting pull requests.Requirements:
To be a contributor, you must follow:
CONTRIBUTING.md file in the project repository root.Privileges:
Contributors enjoy the following privileges:
Organization members are established contributors who participate in and contribute to the MDN Web Docs project regularly. They are expected to act in the interest of the project.
Requirements:
To be an organization member, you must meet one or more of the following requirements:
The following two requirements are mandatory:
Privileges:
Organization members have privileges at the organization level on GitHub.
Maintainers are established contributors who are responsible for one or more projects on MDN. They are expected to participate in making decisions about the policies and priorities of the project. See the process for nominating someone as a maintainer.
As a maintainer, you engage in the following activities:
Requirements:
To be eligible to be a maintainer, you must meet one or more of the following requirements:
[!NOTE] If there is someone you think is eligible for this role, you may nominate a maintainer.
Privileges:
Maintainers have the permissions to approve and merge pull requests.
Owners have wide permissions to manage users and GitHub teams, maintain access across repositories in the MDN organization, maintain repository settings, and deploy to production. Owners are bound by all the requirements of other contributor roles.
[!NOTE] The role of an owner is currently limited to Mozilla staff.
Requirements:
In addition to the responsibilities of other contributor roles, owners have the following responsibilities:
Privileges:
Owners can:
| Role | Requirements | Privileges |
|---|---|---|
| Contributor | Follow the code of conduct and contribution guidelines | - Invitations to contributor events |
One or more of:
Some contributor roles have more nuanced responsibilities and have special eligibility conditions. These include spotlight contributor, invited expert, and community manager.
Spotlight contributors are people who have gone above and beyond with their contributions to MDN Web Docs. Their contributions are in the form of pull requests to improve the project, helping community members on various communication channels or learn forums, or providing feedback on GitHub issues and pull requests.
We feature a spotlight contributor on the MDN website once every month. See the process to nominate someone as a spotlight contributor.
Invited experts have a track record on MDN for their contributions, participation in discussions and reviews, or have proven knowledge in a certain area of expertise. Invited experts are responsible for a specific topic area or a component of the MDN project. They are responsible for reviewing and approving pull requests in their topic or project area, answering technical questions, and maintaining the general health of their particular project. See the process to nominate someone as an invited expert.
In addition to the responsibilities of an organization member, invited experts are responsible for:
Invited experts are automatically assigned for review when pull requests are opened in their topic area. If there is more than one expert in a topic area, they are assigned to pull requests using a load-balancing strategy.
Requirements:
To be eligible to be an invited expert, you must meet one or more of the following requirements:
Privileges:
Invited experts get added to the invited experts team and to the appropriate topic or project team. Invited experts can:
Community managers have a distinct role in many respects. Community managers share many of the same responsibilities as a maintainer. In addition, community managers have the following responsibilities:
See who can be a maintainer.
To nominate someone as a maintainer, open an issue on GitHub:
Issues tab in the mdn/mdn repository, click the New issue button on the right.See who can be a spotlight contributor.
To nominate someone as a spotlight contributor, open an issue on GitHub:
Issues tab in the mdn/mdn repository, click the New issue button on the right.The MDN team will get in touch with the nominated person to get their information to be published on the website under "Contributor Spotlight".
See who can be an invited expert.
To nominate someone as an invited expert, open an issue on GitHub:
Issues tab in the mdn/mdn repository, click the New issue button on the right.Life happens and your commitment levels as a contributor could change over time. Depending on your situation, you might want to:
In all these situations, feel free to discuss your situation and current commitment levels with the MDN team.
A contributor can be demoted or removed as a contributor when responsibilities and requirements aren't being met, including repeated patterns of inactivity or a violation of the code of conduct.
Demotion or removal of a contributor is proposed by a participant during a maintainers meeting. The participant provides supporting information for the demotion or removal request. After discussion, maintainers and community managers vote on the matter to make a decision.
Removing inactive contributors protects the project and its deliverables and also opens up opportunities for new contributors to step in.
We define inactivity as:
Inactivity harms the project; it may lead to unexpected delays, contributor attrition, and a loss of trust in the project. Contributors must be active to set an example and show commitment to the project.
Please communicate with the community team to avoid demotion or removal should your time commitments change; instead you can proactively choose to step down for a while or move to emeritus status.
We manage teams using the GitHub teams feature. When you are added to a team, it means that you have communicated your intent to be more closely involved in the project. This also means that you have some additional responsibilities and rights, as explained below:
A person on a team is commonly added to the CODEOWNERS file for their respective topic area(s) of interest.
When a pull request touches files in your area of responsibility, based on the CODEOWNERS file, you will be added as a reviewer to a pull request automatically using GitHub's load-balancing algorithm.
Members of a team have a higher-level repository access. Repository permissions are assigned to only those repositories where a member needs access.
The teams in the MDN GitHub organization include:
@Core: Core MDN Web Docs team@mdn-community-engagement: People responsible for community engagement across our repositories@mdn-product: People responsible for the MDN Plus product@localization-team-leads: People who lead our individual localization teams@OWD: Contributors from the Open Web Docs non-profit organization@sre: Site reliability engineers who support MDN Web Docs@yari-content: The umbrella team for all MDN Web Docs content reviewers
@yari-content-css and @yari-content-svg.@yari-content-fr and @yari-content-ko.To become a member of a team, you must:
For inquiries and feedback, please reach out to mdn-web-docs-community (at) mozilla (.com).