The Global Maintainer Summit, hosted by GitHub, is an opportunity to share what you've learned with your fellow open source maintainers. We're looking forward to featuring maintainers from a wide range of projects on June 8-9, 2021. Submit your short talk idea here!

Content

Talks can be serious, silly, or painfully vulnerable. The vibe is honesty. Maintaining open source isn’t easy, and behind the scenes, it isn’t glamorous. We're looking for talks on how you identified and approached difficult problems, in short real-world examples. There's a special focus on how you decided what the right solution was. The exact technical answer isn't the same for all projects, but the question often is.

Feel free to share topics that would seem too in-the-weeds, or odd, or vulnerable, for other events. "If you're not sure if it's a fit, submit!" is our motto.

Audience

The audience is maintainers, so you can assume that folks are already involved with project maintenance. While everyone is welcome (and encouraged!) to attend the Global Maintainer Summit, the content itself has a tight focus on peer-to-peer sharing. Don't worry, other folks are putting on events this week that will be aimed at a broader audience.

Details

• Talks will be 15 minutes long - enough to cover a single topic.
• The event is June 8th and 9th, with times to come.
• The event will be live, but there's an option to record your talk instead if you have spotty internet / are asleep when it's going on / are otherwise unable to make it. 
• Since the talks are short, single-speaker talks only please.
• We'll start accepting talks right off, on a rolling basis. The CFP will close on May 1, but getting it in sooner is better.
• Feel free to submit as many ideas as you like.
• The project you talk about can be hosted on any platform.
• Speaker tagline & bio: no need to fill those out unless you really want to. We'll be listing speakers by projects; we won't be listing what company you work for. Just scrawl something in the box so this tool will let you proceed.
• No need to attach a speaker photo, we won't use them. Submittable doesn't allow us to delete these fields ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Maybe send us a cute animal pic?

Examples

Some sample topic ideas: 

• How we improved First Issues in a complex project
• The maintainers' bot army: 5 tools that keep us on track
• Fiscal sponsorship: 3 ways we failed and one way we won
• Lessons learned setting up a corporate maintainership through donated time
• All PR's welcome! ...for now: the evolution of contribution standards as our project grew
• Alert fatigue: What we learned about what we could drop, what we could hand off, and what we couldn't
• Down for Maintenance - how we ensure our maintainers take vacations - even when there's no place to go

None of those are claimed yet, by the way ;)

Questions not answered by this novel-length intro? Reach out to opensource@github.com anytime.