Blog

On Monday, 7 October 2024, the Technical Steering Committee for the Laminas Project held its monthly meeting. The topics discussed included:

• Creating a marketing and outreach committee.
• Hiring a dedicated developer for the Laminas and Mezzio repositories.

Marketing and Outreach Committee

The Laminas Technical Steering Committee (TSC) members have discussed at length the means to build awareness for the Laminas project. This involves marketing, branding and outreach efforts. The members considered creating a separate committee from the TSC that would be directly responsible for these activities, while still answering to the TSC. The new committee's activities would take place in tandem with the technical development of the project. It would be comprised only of members that are interested in these kinds of activities.

The main reason for creating a new Marketing and Outreach Committee (MOC) is the decision-making process which is deemed slow by some of the TSC members. The MOC would only contain individuals who express interest in marketing the Laminas Project, even if this means non-TSC members. Ultimately, the TSC members agreed to create a small marketing plan to begin with and then evaluate its effectiveness. Afterwards, a longer-term marketing plan will be considered.

Dedicated Developer

The increasingly complex projects in the current open-source software ecosystem can benefit from dedicated developers to move things forward effectively. There are several hundred open Pull Requests in the Laminas and Mezzio repositories, some months-old. This new developer would work in a part-time capacity (2-3 days per week) on managing open items and improving the development flow across Laminas and Mezzio components.

There are several important aspects in choosing dedicated developers, like their ability to collaborate well with contributors and their technical experience in effectively working on Laminas and Mezzio components. Rather than fully commit to hiring such individuals and assigning e.g. merging rights, an initial step agreed upon by the TSC members was to only enable triage rights. This allows for a longer evaluation period to ensure that quality reviews and feedback are delivered.

Summary

Both items on the agenda were discussed in detail, and many relevant points of view were considered. These items mark a new direction and bringing a new developer on board, so the ultimate decisions must not be taken lightly. Both have been greenlit, at first with small steps to allow careful evaluation and further discussion in future TSC meetings.