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# How to help Emacs maintainers?
Bastien Guerry

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<https://bzg.fr/en/how-to-help-gnu-emacs-maintainers/>

After 11 years of helping as the Org maintainer, I would
like to share a few lessons learned.  My goal is help everyone take
care of Emacs maintainance by taking care of Emacs maintainers.

# Discussion

- I love it when people just kick it old school and write things out.
- the spiderman syndrome is evil. it causes imposter syndrome that god knows how many contributors it has cost us
- excellent analysis on bdfl/spidysyndrome, you can see it play out in other communities as well
- Very interesting, I suppose I get an idea that maintainers are put on a pedestal, and you see a lot of the good, and bad from both sides of the spectrum. It can be thankless, but also incredibly rewarding. It's easy to miss the forest for the trees, and keep in mind that most every piece of FLOSS software is a very decentralized and maintanance heavy vs. centralized and focused on LOC. 
- i don't get the project vs product
  - project is the process of creating the product (usually)
  - because "project" has been redefined over time to mean the product (such as the codebase), together with the project as in the endeavor to create/develop it
  - Project is a greater scope than product, in my view.  A project is not only the code, but the relationships with others who interact with it.  The product can be the same, but doesn't usually include the support aspect since it's "free".  
- FLOSS software is a fascinating psychological study on that ACDC concept.
- i feel that this doesnt apply only to maintainers. So many managers should listen to it too
- It is really good advice to keep in mind as a manager
- GUIX has a really great community, and has folk like 'jgart' mainly, that has package maintaince workshops where they invite newbies and experienced users alike to contribute packages to GUIX. 
- one of the things that hasn't been brought up yet is maintainer territoriality, I know for many of my projects I can be quite territorial, sometimes unintentionally
- That kind of contribution is invaluable for being an inviting environment for congtributing to a project.
- I think even if the maintainer doesn't intend this potential contributors can perceive it
- Awesome talk! Not just in the context of Org-mode!
- The hand written slides are so engaging!

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