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[Initiative]: Community growth playbook for CNCF projects

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Domain
documentation

Research direction

Start with the cited due diligence reports and the archived CNCF Contributor Strategy to understand the recurring findings and the gap this initiative addresses. Done means producing the playbook and evidence template, updating the incubation and graduation application checklists, and identifying long-term ownership as listed in the exit criteria.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

init/not-started kind/initiative needs-triage sub/project-reviews
Name

Community growth playbook for CNCF projects

Short description

Practical guidance for CNCF projects on contributor recruitment, onboarding, and retention to build sustainable communities.

Responsible group

TOC

Does the initiative belong to a subproject?

Yes

Subproject name

Project Reviews

Primary contact

TBD

Additional contacts

@angellk (TOC Chair, DD finding source)

Origin

DD finding (automated)

Initiative description

This initiative is a request from the TOC. During due diligence reviews, the TOC evaluates projects against incubation and graduation criteria. When the same finding appears across multiple projects, it signals an ecosystem-wide gap that would be better addressed through standardized guidance than repeated per-project recommendations.

This finding has appeared in 22 of 42 DD reports (52%) scanned over the last 5 years, including cncf/toc#2198 (HAMi), cncf/toc#2050 (Tekton), cncf/toc#1468 (wasmCloud), cncf/toc#1924 (Dragonfly), cncf/toc#1862 (KServe), cncf/toc#1513 (Kubescape), and others. The most recent DD to surface this was HAMi incubation DD (merged 2026-07-02).

DDs routinely recommend improving contributor ladder documentation, demonstrating contributor recruitment beyond the founding organization, documenting onboarding processes, and showing evidence of the contributor lifecycle in practice (promotions via public PRs, LFX mentorship, etc.). The CNCF Contributor Strategy was archived; no active body owns community growth guidance for projects.

Scope: Create a practical playbook covering contributor recruitment strategies, onboarding documentation patterns, contributor ladder best practices, retention mechanisms, and evidence expectations for DD reviewers. Address the gap left by the Contributor Strategy archival.

Timeline: TBD

Deliverable(s) or exit criteria
  • Community growth playbook (recruitment, onboarding, retention, ladder best practices)
  • Evidence template: how to document contributor lifecycle in practice (promotion PRs, mentorship, diversity metrics)
  • DD checklist item update — PR to incubation and graduation application templates
  • Identify long-term ownership (TAG, subproject, or TOC-owned)
Tracking document for meeting and progress

TBD

Dominant language
HTML
Stars
1.9k
Forks
728
Avg merge
3d 23h
Merged PRs (30d)
10

Getting set up

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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