OPEN open source software

I’m a front-end enthusiast and developer, and I love the vibrant javascript tooling ecosystem we’re currently experiencing.

There’s an amazing amount of quality open source software being built and available in the public domain right now. ♥️

So how open is an open source project? Not every project is managed or maintained the same. Some project are small and have just 1 maintainer, some opt for a few gate-keepers or owners.

How you maintain your project is up to you, but we’re opening up Storybook (an OSS project I’m a maintainer of) to be as open as possible.

Here’s a few guidelines:

1. When someone creates an issue, this is someone helping us out, so we are thankful, and want to help back.
2. We invite issues creators to submit a Pull-Request and assist with understanding the codebase.
3. The roadmap is openly discussed in our slack channel. And is published on the repository.
4. We label support questions so it’s easy for non-coders to find issues to help with too.
5. When someone is showing interest and has been helping out we invite them to become co-maintainer. This gives them full access to the repository.
6. Someone from the current team (so far it has been me) will have a video chat with the new maintainer to get to know the person a bit, welcome to the team and sync ideas about the current situation and future roadmap.

These guidelines were not invented by me, in fact most are on http://openopensource.org

So far they have been working out really well for storybook. Our number of maintainers has been growing and we’re a committed team.

I think especially considering the amount of internal restructuring the storybook codebase has been going through releasing 3.0.0; this can definitely be called a success story.

Every issue creator is a potential PR submitter,
and every PR submitter is a potential maintainer. [tweet this]
~ Norbert de Langen

In the case of storybook we have quite a few independent developers creating addons for the main project. 🙇

We reached out to as many as we could find to get them involved in the main project and get them aware the internal restructuring was happening.

We moved to a monolithic repository (monorepo) using lerna, because we think it’d amazing if we could have a multitude of addons and types of storybook build by a large group of people in an open way.

If you want to participate in the discussion and are interested in joining the cause, please jump in our Slack channel. We’re a friendly bunch and welcome all collaborators at any level of experience!

On the topic of openness, we have opened an open collective account. So if you personally or the company you work for wants to help us you can also do that financially (in a transparent way).

If you believe in the spirit of open open source, please hit the heart button below to help others find it. and if you want to keep up to date on Storybook progress, follow our channel. We have a lot of exciting announcements coming up!

♥️️ storybook team