Catalyzing

Catalysts are contributors that are actively helping the maintainers to maintain the repo.

Qualities:

• Common sense
• Initiative
• Diligence

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Priorities for catalyts (22 May)

This week, we're focusing on ease-of-use tasks. Here's a list of things you can help with this week.

1. Review the documentation users get when downloading/installing AutoGPT - make suggestions on how it can be clearer.
2. Scan for unclear instructions, poorly visible links, and other stuff that might get users stuck
3. Scan the support channel for common questions/themes that can be answered by updating the instructions
4. Note down the found issues so we can create a report of all issues
5. Create draft PR for common ease-of-use issues, and share it with the rest of us to comment.
6. Prepare release notes for 0.3.2, which goes out on Thursday

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EDIT (16 May): We're upscaling our workflow: Read here

Priorities for catalysts (16 May):

1. broken code / bugfixes

2. high bang-for-buck features

3. close any clearly obsolete PR

4. Label any likely-obsolete PR with Obsolete? label

5. Pointing issues to PRs

6. Find duplicates

• Crosslink
• If lots of duplicates, create a fresh issue and crosslink it to ALL duplicates
• https://github.com/torantulino/git-aid ^ This tool (which you can find from the Wiki:Maintainers' page) finds duplicate issues. (Does it do dup PRs?? someone?)

7. Scout for talent (examine PRs for good quality and seek to involve talented engineers as catalyst / maintainer)

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NOTE: If you're interested to operate as a maintainer, please operate as a catalyst for a while (it's a great way to onboard -- to work with the maintainers and get the hang of how we do things -- we're still getting the hang of this ourselves).

There's no clear black/white definition of what's involved here. Whatever catalyzes the stability / development / evolution of AutoGPT.

This project is about Autonomy. That's the Auto in AutoGPT. Autonomous agents. If we ourselves move towards autonomy, we're using our energy best. Proactive / creative wins. If you find structure to be bad / missing, please work to improve it. That might involve contacting a maintainer.

Generally catalysts have a good understanding of the project source code. The main effort is to manage our backlog of issues and PRs. As of writing we have 300 open PRs and 500 open issues. Note that you can still be super-useful helping with organization without code-level introspection.

This involves some of:

• keeping an eye on the #catalysts-chat on the Discord

  • Often a maintainer will ask for someone to take on a task

• helping with admin

  • Evaluating the merit of issues / PRs
  • Closing those that are not useful to the project
  • Labelling issues / PRs and getting them up on the Kanban
    • Adding milestones to cards (discuss on Discord if it helps)
  • Helping get/keep the kanban / roadmap in shape
  • Communicating with authors in the GitHub conversation threads (and/or here) to get the issue/PR into shape

• dev-work

  • Fixing PRs so they can be fast-track merged
  • Working with maintainers to get contributions merged

• Keeping an eye on the Discord:

  • helping out generally
  • noticing devs that that merit a Contributor badge and onboarding them
  • noticing contributors that merit a Catalyst badge and onboarding them

(Contact pi#8377 for giving badges)

Check the tools in the Maintaining section of this wiki. You'll find a couple of tools that are very helpful for operating over this project.

Also:

• Helping to improve this wiki
• Helping to improve the doc
• Keeping an eye on the Discord

Lastly:

• Whatever you can think of that helps the project. If you spot something we can do / improve, let us know!

(TODO) Stock messages for issues/PRs:

• PEBCAK
• not our problem
• bad quality
• PR is bad quality
• Issue/PR is dup.
• etc.