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Yep right hello again,

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let's talk about i'm sure most of you have seen this picture at some point we're

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going to talk about laser pointers broken but you know who i'm talking about

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that guy what does he do who is he Why is he doing it?

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So we're talking about maintainers. What is a maintainer anyway?

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Chances are the maintainer of a certain project is the original author of the project.

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It's often the case, doesn't have to be the case, but let's assume it is.

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Then they are also likely the lead developer of the project.

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And also what in a corporate world one would call a software architect.

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Then when the project has some form of UI, chances are they are also the designer

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or the UI designer, the UX designer of that project.

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Whether that's a good idea or not is up for debate, but more often than not, that's the case.

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They are also likely the one who takes care of CI and CD infrastructure and

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are a sysadmin for the website of the project or any auxiliary build and promotion infrastructure.

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Then chances are they're going to take care of packaging for various app stores

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or package managers, distributions and so on.

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One, already mentioned, system administrator for various things.

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They're also the one who set out the guidelines for what's happening with the

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project and the product. So in a way, they are a product manager.

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And some people like to say the most important thing a maintainer can say is

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no to contributions that don't fit the vision of the project.

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They're also likely the one doing bug triage and bug fixing primarily,

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dealing with user support, questions, complaints, and everything.

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And once you have a certain community around you, of which about a third is

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reserved for sleep and most or a lot of maintainers don't only do that in their

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free time, which is very limited.

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And so things can get rather slow.

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There's also risk of bus factor, because if there's one guy or one person taking

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care of everything, if that person, something happens to them,

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doesn't have to be a bus, then that project is in trouble.

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And then there's the saying, jack of all trades, master of none.

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And when you have to take care of all of these things, then you are very quickly

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a jack of all trades, but not necessarily a master of anything.

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And with all of that, it's very, very likely that the person is at risk of burnout.

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And once you're at the point where you kind of burned out of the project and

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people keep coming to you with things to do and suggestions and complaints,

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you develop a sort of siege mentality where you block off any attempt at challenging

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the status quo and just refuse to do anything differently, even if it's a reasonable request.

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So a single maintainer project can quite quickly devolve to a dictatorship over that project.

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So, how do we do things in KDE? Most KDE projects don't have a formal maintainer.

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For frameworks, we even explicitly remove that information from the metadata

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files because quite often it was wrong anyway.

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And quite often we have something that Nates likes to describe as a council

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of elders, which is a couple of senior developers that do a lot of the things

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that the maintainer is supposed to do and make decisions about the project.

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Then we have a sysadmin team that takes care of CI infrastructure,

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website infrastructure, build infrastructure, email, a ton of things.

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We also have people looking after websites. We have a bug squad that takes care of bug triage.

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We have a visual design group. We have a promo team.

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We have KDEV taking care of a lot of legal and financial matters that nobody wants to deal with.

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We have people dedicated to doing user support.

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We have translators because no single maintainer can translate for all languages.

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We have distributions that take care of packaging and some form of user support.

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And generally, we have a community. And I think that's what makes KDE not unique, but special.

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Is this all fine and dandy and perfect? No, there's some unique risks and challenges to that.

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One of them is fragmentation of the community. If you have individual groups

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or people taking care of things, then things can get quite fragmented.

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And if those groups don't talk to each other, there will be conflict.

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Then there's overhead to it. If Plasma needs to wait for SysAdmin or SysAdmin

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needs to wait for Plasma or anyone waiting on anything introduces a lot of communication

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overhead and delays and generally not pleasant experiences.

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And when you are able to focus on only one thing, you may or may not become

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master of that thing, but you only become master of one thing and don't even

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get close to being a jack-of-all-trades.

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Then not only does the community fragment, the knowledge in the community fragments

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because very few people outside of Ben know how to run our infrastructure which

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is causing bus factor issues,

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and there can also be a lack of ownership

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about some parts of the code that a community so if somebody writes something

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then disappears and then nobody feels like they should be careful care for something

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that thing can rot and if then somebody comes and wants to do something about

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it but no one's around to review and merge patches for it,

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that can cause a lot of frustration and issues for new-time people.

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Let's think about all of those. And with that, I'm done.

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Thank you.