📣 Strategy Update 📣 NOTE: this is a repost from the private channel. Now that we have a public one, I think it makes sense to share it here. As discussed, I’ll be finding public places to track most of the suggestions where appropriate. Hi all! Following up on the previous strategy update we identified several pain points that aligned with the current stated kernel and appeared as consistent themes in our workshops which we can and should get cracking on ASAP. To that end, and with the spirit of being as transparent as possible, I’ve been working with the team at SmartBear to consider how we can best support some of these activities and create alignment between the commercial and community initiatives. I’d like to communicate intent around the initiative we are calling “SmartBear supported”. You may have seen https://docs.pact.io/help/smartbear already, including a primitive labelling system we’ve been using to pick up tickets (into the SmartBear team backlog) across some projects. We would like to expand on this concept further. Some of this stems from our own customers wanting to see more support from us around the open source elements of the service we provide and some of it from within, wanting to improve our commitment (see also why we created PactFlow: https://pactflow.io/blog/why-build-an-open-source-company/) 🎯 The goal of this initiative is to find alignment between SmartBear’s commercial objectives and the open source ecosystem. The initial rollout aim is to start small and focus on key areas that can be improved for both parties. What we have done in preparation and research for this: 1. Identified the key challenges for SmartBear (PactFlow) as it relates to the OSS project (see the “Voice of the customer” image, with customer data/commentary redacted) 2. Brainstormed some approaches to address these needs and affinity mapped them (purple cards with yellow cards surrounding them) 3. Identified a number of actions we can take to improve that situation 4. Mapped these against the key OSS challenges (orange cards are the actions and the yellow ones are the root causes from the OSS strategy) 5. Worked with internal stakeholders to create alignment around what we would like to achieve and what we are able to commit to What we have come up with so far are four key areas. We are aiming to implement the following in the coming weeks/months: 1. Agree and communicate the SmartBear supported initiative a. What it is and why we are doing it. TL;DR - we want to improve the Pact ecosystem and take additional responsibilities in ensuring its success 2. Agree and implement a contributor triage process a. The objective here is to be able to provide improved support and responsiveness for “in scope” projects (given the volume across the ecosystem, we may extend to all assets but we will see) b. This includes any issues, features and pull requests - i.e. preventing stale contributions, and encouraging more 3. Review and improve OSS/Commercial communications a. This is all about improving the communication and experiences where PactFlow and Pact intersect in public 4. Maintainer Experience a. Make it easier for maintainers to get involved, do their job and stay up to date (there is bit more detail in the attached images, but the detail is still being worked on) What I need from you Feedback on the concept or ideas that could improve upon them. Particularly given point (3) above. I appreciate some of the workshop/Miro snippets may be a bit lost without further context, so please do ask/reach out if you want to know more. The biggest potential source of conflict/issue I can see, is supporting assets that are not currently maintained by SmartBear employees (e.g. Pact .NET which is quite active already but behind on some major features or Pact Python which is in a bit of limbo). A related topic on the agenda (related to point 3) is how to get non-SmartBear maintained projects up to the latest features, so we may need to solve it anyway. What next? Once feedback has been sought, we’ll get to work on finalising implementation. Some of the above we can get cracking on right away e.g. we can start to draft the wording and details of (1) to share, (3) is mostly an audit and proposed update, (4) is all stuff we’ve agreed to do previously.

Yes that was on my list to kill with fire, due to it being empty and taking up cognitive load. Nice work on the discussion pieces

Thanks, as you may have noticed they are all WIP but nobody is looking yet so I'll clean up Monday

a wip something is better than a whole bunch of nothing and yer weekend is calling