We're excited to announce a new way to engage with Puppet contributors that combines elements of Contributor Summit and #puppethacks into a new virtual event: Contributor Summit Online. With a kickoff during Puppetize Live, a month-long collaboration period to work on projects, and a cumulation at Contributor Summit Online on 14 November, we're looking at new ways to collaborate asynchronously on Puppet-related projects.

The start: We’re going to kick our contribution activities off at Puppetize Live itself, where we’ll initiate projects that will then continue for the whole month leading up to Contributor Summit Online. You can join us at a Puppetize Live event in San Francisco, Sydney, or Amsterdam, or join us online for the live stream. We'll have a few starter projects ready to go that use Puppet 6 features along with some exciting new stuff that will get revealed at Puppetize Live for you to run with, or you can invent your own.

You can work by yourself or organize into teams that we'll help facilitate. But the best part of this is that we're dedicating resources to your project for this month that you might not have ever had access to before. Have you ever wanted advice on running a UX study on your own project? Or maybe you'd like a chance for Tim Sharpe (@rodjek) to critique your unit tests? Maybe you'd like some folks to work with you on creating effective documentation for your project. Maybe you just want a little pair programming or code review from that professional services engineer who came on-site last year. We’ll help support collaboration and solving technical problems, and will try to keep everyone unblocked. We're excited to facilitate deliberate collaboration between Puppet folks and the rest of the community, even for folks that haven't been involved before.

Vox Pupuli (who I can’t possibly say enough good things about) is going to play a large part in this. Tim Meusel (@bastelfreak) will introduce the organization at Puppetize Live and describe how you can get involved with that part of the wider Puppet community. Some of the starter projects we'll have for you will come from their backlog, meaning that you’ll be working on solving real problems and your project could get personal attention from their management committee.

You'll work at your own pace and on your own schedule. We'll facilitate your project management during this sprint just as much as you need or not at all. We can offer weekly roadmap check-ins, or we can help you with scope definition. We can help you with your Travis integration, or with migrating a project into the Vox Pupuli namespace.

We'll culminate with a full-day virtual summit on 14 November to welcome as many people worldwide as we can. You'll have an opportunity to present your project if you'd like, or you can simply share it as a release announcement and we'll amplify your message. We'll demonstrate a selection of the resulting projects that we feel best exemplifies our shared vision for the future and we'll present awards — both for the month and appreciation awards for outstanding community members throughout the year. And now that you've had a month to get your hands dirty with the new products we'll host discussions in various formats (roundtable, Q&A, etc.) to make sure that you've got all your questions answered and you're fully equipped to use them in the best ways possible.

Join us across these dates:

Kickoff at Puppetize Live: 9 and 10 October

Contributor Month: 11 October through 13 November

Contributor Summit Online: 14 November

We know that you've got a lot of ideas and a lot of opinions. And we know that we've made a lot of changes this year, so we'll also be asking your for your feedback, both from a product standpoint and from a community standpoint. We'll be holding a Q&A session during the virtual summit with some of the company and engineering leadership and you'll have the opportunity to ask questions and offer suggestions. You are what makes this work, and we want to make sure you're heard.

We'll keep you updated, but start thinking about projects that we can help facilitate!

Nigel Kersten is VP of engineering at Puppet.

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