FINOS Maintainers Cheatsheet
Welcome to the FINOS Maintainers Cheatsheet, the guide for new and experienced FINOS Maintainers on engaging with the FINOS Community, FINOS Team and FINOS Governing Board to drive project success.
About FINOS
FINOS is part of The Linux Foundation and has the mission to enable a global community to create open source solutions for financial services. The FINOS Knowledge Base contains helpful resources on FINOS, the FINOS community and FINOS projects. Learn more in the FINOS Governance and email [email protected] with questions or suggestions.
FINOS Projects and Special Interest Groups (SIGs)
FINOS Open Source Software projects, Open Standards projects, and Special Interest Groups (SIGs) are at the very core of FINOS' mission to accelerate the use and development of open source software, standards, and practices to solve common challenges and drive innovation within the financial services industry.
The open source software and standards projects hosted within FINOS cover a wide range of functions key to financial services including interoperability, cloud, infrastructure and data.
The FINOS Landscape provides an overview of all FINOS projects and Special Interest Groups, and the FINOS GitHub organization hosts the code of all FINOS projects.
Maintainer Role
Each FINOS project and SIG has a community of participants, also referred to as "contributors", and maintainers.
A contributor is anyone who submits a contribution to the project. Contributions include code & pull requests, issues, comments, documentation, media, or any combination of the above.
A maintainer is a contributor who, by virtue of their contribution history, has been given write access to project repositories and may approve and merge contributions to the project.
It is possible, and advised, that projects have multiple maintainers, in which case maintainers will elect one or two lead maintainers. The lead maintainer is the project's interface with the FINOS Team and Governing Board. Lead maintainers are responsible for communicating with the FINOS Team, Governing Board and Community on behalf of the project. The lead maintainer(s) are also accountable for steering project direction and prioritisation with the rest of the project community. They are also accountable for the quality of deliverables produced by the project community.
FINOS Standards projects can also have editors.
MAINTAINERS.md file
Every FINOS repository is expected to include a root-level MAINTAINERS.md file that clearly identifies the current project maintainers. The file gives contributors a consistent place to find who can review contributions, provide project guidance, and make or coordinate project decisions.
Project maintainers are responsible for keeping the MAINTAINERS.md file accurate and up to date. Each maintainer entry should include the maintainer's GitHub username, name, organization, and email address. Keeping this information visible supports open governance, gives public recognition to the people and organizations sustaining the project, and helps FINOS and Linux Foundation projects maintain a transparent record of project leadership.
All changes to the maintainer list must be managed openly:
- Submit a Pull Request to
MAINTAINERS.mdfor any maintainer addition, removal, or update. - If the project's governance requires a vote for maintainer changes, document or link to the vote outcome in the PR description or comments.
- Use the PR history as the public audit trail for project leadership changes over time.
Please email [email protected] whenever MAINTAINERS.md is updated with a change to maintainership.
Maintainer responsibilities and available resources
FINOS project maintainers are responsible for technical & subject matter oversight of the project, and for driving community growth and engagement. FINOS supports project maintainers and their project communities through:
- operational enablement & support: GitHub, meeting infrastructure
- guidance and coaching on open source governance and best practices
- project marketing: coordination and production of webinars, newsletters, podcasts, participation in FINOS and external conferences and events, project merchandising/ swag
FINOS project maintainers are encouraged to leverage the Linux Foundation's LFX Project Control Center, a platform that enables self-service configuration for governance, membership, IT, developer and collaboration tools, documentation, and community roles.
The below table lists maintainers' responsibilities and available resources. Please email [email protected] to get in touch with the FINOS team with questions and suggestions.
| Maintainer Responsibility | How FINOS supports you |
|---|---|
| Grow project maturity and community | Virtually all FINOS hosted projects are expected to strive towards, and ultimately attain, Graduated status. The FINOS team supports projects in this journey through:
|
| Run Project Meetings | Project maintainers are welcome to engage with their project community through project meetings. If they choose to do so, maintainers are responsible for creating meeting agendas, recording meeting attendance and publishing meeting minutes. |
| Maintain project leadership records | Maintainers are responsible for keeping the root-level MAINTAINERS.md file accurate and up to date. FINOS supports this by providing a standard MAINTAINERS.md template, opening rollout PRs where possible, and helping projects resolve questions about format or process via [email protected]. Any addition, removal, or update should be proposed through a Pull Request, with any required vote outcome documented or linked in the PR. |
| CI/CD | Project maintainers are responsible for integrating Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment into their FINOS project builds: |
| Documentation | Maintainers are responsible for publishing project documentation from their project's GitHub Repositories to FINOS Project Websites. |
| Security | Maintainers are responsible for preventing, discovering and responsibly disclosing Security Vulnerability Issues as they affect their projects |