Meteor Software is thrilled to announce the formation of work groups within the Meteor.js community to help drive the future of the platform, bring focus to key features, and ensure long-term improvements. These groups will consist of community leaders, contributors, and stakeholders who are committed to enhancing Meteor.
Two Types of Work Groups
To better address both ongoing needs and specific goals, we are introducing two types of work groups:
Standing Work Groups
These groups focus on overarching themes or sets of features that require ongoing maintenance and improvements. Examples of topics they will cover include:
- Security
- User Accounts
- Build Tool
- Testing
Standing work groups will operate continuously to ensure their areas of responsibility remain stable, secure, and up to date. Their work may include adding new features, patching issues, and improving existing systems over multiple releases.
Goal-Oriented Work Groups
These groups are created with specific goals in mind, usually tied to items on the Meteor roadmap. They will work toward achieving a defined goal with a clear deadline, typically aligned with a specific release. Once their goal is accomplished, these work groups will be dissolved, and responsibility for maintaining their contributions will be transitioned to a standing group. Examples of potential tasks include:
- Adding roles and permissions systems
- Implementing MongoDB change streams
- Enabling database migrations
- Integrating new bundlers such as Vite
Group Structure and Participation
Each work group will consist of:
- A Meteor Software (MS) representative: A developer from MS will be an active coding member of each group. They will have merge permissions for PRs and oversee releases in goal-oriented groups. This role underscores MS's hands-on commitment to the project's success.
- Critical stakeholders: These include original package owners (if integrating community packages), creators of alternative solutions, and key community members who have made notable contributions in the given field. Their involvement ensures the integration of the best possible version of the solution.
- Contributors: Reliable, recognized community members who will work on major parts of the project such as documentation, tests, and core feature development.
- Stakeholders from relevant companies: Organizations that depend on specific features and can offer critical feedback and testing support may also join.
It's important to note that everyone is still encouraged to contribute. The creation of these work groups is meant to provide leadership and focus on topics that are crucial to Meteor's
future, without restricting broader community involvement.
Work Group Leadership and Public Involvement
Each group will have a designated leader responsible for coordinating meetings and communicating progress to the wider community. With the exception of security-related discussions, all work group meetings will be public. This ensures that community members can observe the decision-making process, offer feedback, and contribute ideas.
Announcing first Work Groups
Goal-Oriented Work Group: Roles (Meteor 3.1)
Task: Integrate the community-developed alanning:roles package into Meteor core.
Expected Release: Meteor 3.1
Key Members: Denilson Silva, Jan Dvorak, Jan Kuester
Transition: Once the goal is met, this work group will evolve into a standing group: Accounts.
Standing Work Group: Accounts (after Meteor 3.1 release)
Task: Maintain and enhance Meteor's accounts system, ensuring it remains secure, user-friendly, and feature-rich. Possible future features include support for Passkeys and Apple OAuth.
Ongoing maintenance: The Accounts group will be responsible for future improvements and new feature development related to user authentication.
Standing Work Group: Build Tool
Headed by: Nacho Codoner
Task: Continuously enhance Meteor's build tools to improve developer experience and performance.
Goal-Oriented Work Group: MongoDB Change Streams
Headed by: Leonardo Venturini
Task: Add support for MongoDB change streams in Meteor, targeting a future major release.
Get Involved
In the near future, we will release a sign-up form for volunteers who are interested in contributing to these work groups. Whether you want to help shape the future of Meteor or just keep tabs on key developments, we encourage everyone to participate.
Note that we will be choosing people to join these work groups so it is good if you have some work history that we can reference. Note that there are also non-programming tasks like helping improving documentation. For company representatives and important determination will be if your company supports open source developers in the Meteor ecosystem.
This initiative will help streamline decision-making, prioritize important features, and ensure that each release brings exciting new advancements to Meteor.js. We look forward to seeing the positive impact these groups will bring!
Stay tuned for more updates and ways to get involved!
PS: Join us on Meteor Dispatches this Friday for Q&A session!
Top comments (1)
This sounds like a great initiative to organize development efforts in the Meteor.js community! Will the work group meetings also include opportunities for community members to submit ideas for future roadmap goals? Would love to see more on that!