RIOT Community Processes
The community around RIOT gathers many IoT developers and users from around the world, from the industry, from academia, and hobbyists. The RIOT community is open to everyone. To join and interact, you are invited to:
- join and post to the forum,
- post on GitHub,
- connect and post to the Matrix chat,
- join virtual or f2f meetings.
The community self-organizes using the open processes described below.
Code contributions are very welcome. In order to streamline and harmonize code quality, contributors must follow the contributing guidelines. Aside of code contributions, you can also contribute to RIOT on other aspects, e.g. by actively participating in technical and non-technical discussions within the community. Regular and interim virtual meetings are announced on the devel mailing list.
Among contributors, some have maintainer status, which consists in rights (merge rights) and duties (code review duties).
Maintainers can propose to give maintainer status to contributors that have been noticed as particularly active in some domain of RIOT. The decision to grant this status is then taken via consensus among maintainers. If there is consensus on granting the status to a particular contributor, a maintainer will contact personally this contributor to propose the status, which the contributor can then accept (or turn down).
We are constantly looking for more maintainers. So if you are up for that, please start (or continue) contributing code and reviews!
To contact maintainers, the best is to interact over actual RIOT code on GitHub.
Parts of the community are gathered in Task Forces, which provides a specific venue focusing on a particular technical topic.
Among contributors, some are also interested in discussing RIOT matters and perspectives, beyond coding RIOT. In short, maintainers focus on technical aspects, while coordinators focus on non-technical aspects of RIOT activity. Of course, there is a strong overlap between maintainers and coordinators.
Coordinator status consists essentially in duties (bringing up topics, debates and deal with the overhead). But sometimes, coordinator status does bring some moral reward (e.g. when an initiative brings organizational improvements, in the end ;).
Coordinators can propose to give coordinator status to contributors that have been noticed as particularly active in this domain. The decision to grant this status is then taken via consensus among coordinators. If there is consensus on granting the status to a particular contributor, a coordinator will contact personally this contributor to propose the status, which the contributor can then accept (or turn down).
To contact coordinators, the best is to email the generic mailing list riot@riot-os.org