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Contributor-growth skill family

Scope — organization: ASF · 🪶 ASF-specific. This family encodes Apache Software Foundation processes (the contributor-to-committer path) and assumes an ASF adopter profile by default. Non-ASF projects can still adopt it through the adapter/config layer, but it carries ASF assumptions the generic families do not.

Maintainer-facing skills that span the contributor-to-committer path: welcoming first-time contributors, keeping the issue backlog newcomer- ready, tracking contribution activity, checking readiness against declared thresholds, assembling nomination evidence, and walking nominators through post-vote onboarding. Seven skills cover the staged path from first contact through committer promotion.

Why a framework skill family? The contributor-to-committer path is one of the highest-leverage levers an open-source project has for long-term health — lowering onboarding friction and shortening the time from first PR to committer status keeps the contributor pipeline healthy. These skills were designed independently but cover a contiguous path; grouping them makes the adopter configuration and the evaluation story coherent.

Stage coverage

Stage Skill What it does
First contact mentoring-welcome Drafts an orientation comment for a first-time contributor on a newly opened issue or PR; detects first-time authorship via the GitHub author_association field and skips repeat contributors.
Issue on-ramp good-first-issue-author Drafts one net-new good first issue from a supplied gap or small task; a suitability gate and R1–R9 readiness checklist gate the draft; waits for maintainer confirmation before filing via gh.
Backlog curation good-first-issue-sweep Sweeps the open issue backlog for existing issues that could be labelled as good first issues; scores each against the G1–G7 suitability rubric; classifies as READY / NEAR-MISS / SKIP and proposes labels after explicit maintainer confirmation.
Activity tracking contributor-activity-sweep Produces a read-only GitHub activity card (PRs authored, code reviews, issues, comments) over a configurable window.
Readiness check contributor-to-committer Maps a contributor’s GitHub activity against the adopter’s PMC-declared committer or PMC thresholds; surfaces a traffic-light brief (Not yet / Approaching / Ready to nominate) and a gap table showing what would close each remaining gap. Read-only; never opens a nomination thread.
Nomination brief contributor-nomination Assembles evidence prose for a committer or PMC vote thread: activity breadth, consistency, vendor-neutrality context, and a nomination-ready summary. Read-only; never posts to any list.
Post-vote onboarding committer-onboarding Walks the nominator through ICLA check, account provisioning, permissions grant, and the welcome announcement for committer and PMC promotions at ASF TLPs and podlings.

Every stage is read-only on governance artefacts or propose-before-post: no skill modifies a roster, posts an announcement, or files an issue without explicit maintainer confirmation.

Skills

Skill Mode Status
mentoring-welcome Mentoring experimental
good-first-issue-author Mentoring experimental
good-first-issue-sweep Mentoring experimental
contributor-activity-sweep Triage experimental
contributor-to-committer Mentoring experimental
contributor-nomination Triage experimental
committer-onboarding Triage experimental

All seven skills are experimental; no adopter has run the full contributor-to-committer path under evaluation conditions yet.

Family boundary

This family sits alongside two overlapping skill families:

  • docs/mentoring/README.md — the Agentic Mentoring mode spec and family overview. mentoring-welcome, good-first-issue-author, and good-first-issue-sweep carry mode: Mentoring and are also listed in that spec. The families cross-reference each other; a later maturity review may clarify the boundary or merge the two into one.
  • docs/issue-management/README.md — general-issue triage and fix workflow. The contributor-growth family reads GitHub activity data about contributors, not issue content; the two families use different query surfaces and produce different artefacts (activity cards and nomination briefs vs. issue disposition proposals).

Skills in this family propose every state-changing action for human sign-off. committer-onboarding emits paste-ready command recipes the nominator executes as themselves; no skill submits an ICLA form, invites an account, or modifies repository permissions without the nominator’s direct action.

Adopter contract

The skills resolve project-specific content from these files in the adopter’s <project-config>/ directory:

File Used by
project.md all skills (upstream repo slug, GitHub token context, <tracker> reference)
pmc-roster.md contributor-nomination, committer-onboarding (PMC and committer rosters, ICLA-checker URL)
contributor-nomination-config.md contributor-nomination (activity-window length, committer / PMC thresholds, required-areas gates); also used by contributor-to-committer as a fallback when committer-readiness.md is absent
committer-readiness.md contributor-to-committer (per-target threshold tables for committer/PMC readiness, assessment window; takes precedence over contributor-nomination-config.md)
mentoring-welcome-config.md mentoring-welcome (tone knobs, contributing-doc links, AI-attribution footer wording)
good-first-issue-config.md good-first-issue-author, good-first-issue-sweep (issue-tracker URL, getting-started link, GFI-label name, suitability rubric threshold)

Status

Experimental. All seven skills are on main with eval suites; no adopter has run the full contributor-to-committer path end-to-end under evaluation conditions.

Known deferred items (each pending a spec-RFC pass that enumerates per-project policy knobs before a skill can safely propose anything):

  • PMC-member nomination — vote mechanics, quorum rules, and post-vote steps differ from committer promotion and warrant a separate capability-flag variant of committer-onboarding or a standalone skill.
  • Emeritus / inactive-committer handling and contributor offboarding — these involve project-level governance decisions (roster policy, access removal, farewell communication norms) that need per-project configuration.

Cross-references

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