Open Call for Contributors: Paving the road to the Appathon

[Arlodotexe]

📢 Hey everyone! A quick announcement about the ongoing rewrite for our community infrastructure!

🧭 🗺️ Where are we now?

Over the last year (since December 2023), we've designed and prototyped MVP libraries for low-level SDK details.
Over the last few months, we've started consolidating and distilling higher-level, long-term strategies and plans.

Now, we're detailing and mapping out tasks for anyone who wants to jump in, which you can see in real-time on our project board.
Particularly, we have non-SDK feature parity work for the new Server Companion bot rewrite ready to be worked on.

In the coming days, I'll be opening more SDK-related tickets. There's a prerequisite planning ticket to wrap up before we can finalize our repeatable strategy for implementation across types.

Details to follow over the next week or so. In the meantime...

🔎 We're looking for contributors

We need to take note of who's willing to help contribute, so we can start high-level planning for things like:

• Coordinating and mapping tasks effectively
• Delegating to the right people
• Upskilling contributors as needed or desired.

This approach helps us keep a healthy balance between individual capacity and collective requirements, a strategy I've explained at length here. The short version is:

• We want to spot burnout risks before they become a problem
• Avoid misallocating tasks to folks who don’t have the bandwidth or relevant skills
• Identify opportunities for anyone who wants or needs to grow their skills or get more involved in strategic planning.
• Identify and address excessive planning (overly proactive tasks) or "firefighting" (overly reactive tasks)

🤸 Getting involved

To help keep track of contributors, I've registered our "Server Companion" Discord bot and our new Windows App Community SDK using our old community infra.

If you'd like to contribute in any capacity, whether by helping plan or by taking on individual tasks, let us know here (or DM me) so we can add you as a "Developer" and give you the appropriate role.

🚶 Next Steps

• We're gathering a list of everyone who would like to volunteer their time and skills.
• As we go, we'll put together a plan that considers everyone's available capability and capacity, then start assigning tasks accordingly.
• As tickets move forward and we open new ones, we'll continue balancing individual and collective needs/requirements.
• If we hit any bumps, our label setup is carefully designed to cover every combination of area and change type it can-- from basic development to the very processes that we use to work and plan.

⏱️ Timeframes, closing thoughts

We're entering the next phase making our new SDK and tooling. Once we launch it, we can finally get the Appathon off the ground for everyone!

Let's do this-- Intentionally, carefully and skillfully.

If we approach this with careful and consistent effort, we could see our new tooling completed well before the end of spring 2025, just in time to kick off the Appathon for Summer.
On the flip side, if the project is managed poorly or lacks the resources it needs, the remainder of the work needed to reach MVP and kick off the Appathon could extend into 2026.
Luckily, we have the high-level insights and tooling we need to prevent that kind of delay.

Thanks for your time, everyone! I'm looking forward to hearing from members interested in contributing!