The Gofrs (pronounced Gophers) is a community-formed group working together to better the entire Go ecosystem. Some of these efforts include picking up the maintenance of projects that are widely used or have a large impact, as well as considering new solutions to problems that arise as the number of Go programmers continues to grow.
We initially formed in the summer of 2018 to take one of the most popular UUID packages in the Go ecosystem,
github.com/satori/go.uuid, and have started to look at contributing to more projects.
The biggest way that we can be successful at meeting our goals, is to make it as easy as possible for people in the community to contribute. This means doing our best to allow people to easily join our organization, and to help them be successful.
Do you have a project you think would be a good fit to help us maintain? This could be a project you're currently the maintainer of or one that you rely on personally.
Is there a problem the Go community is facing that you feel might be good to put our group effort behind? If so, you can file a help request.
The Gofrs organization exists to help strengthen the Go ecosystem through the maintenance of critical packages, and the inception of new solutions to problems that arise as our community grows.
If you found a project you feel would be a good fit for us to maintain, or a problem you think we're uniquely equipped to address, we're currently using GitHub issues to track these requests (and the subsequent discussions).
The GitHub Discussions have a template of information to fill out, which is used to help us initially gauge whether the project would be a good fit for us. After the issue is filed, someone from the Gofrs will review the help request and start the appropriate conversation.
You can open a GitHub Discussions here.
If you'd like to help triage issues, to help maintain a package you think we should maintain, or to have a say in the direction we take as a group, you can join our organization. This process is fairly light.
Having people suggest packages for us to maintain is invaluable, and we'll continue to need that help until we build a good way to discover these projects on our own. That said, if we aren't able to continue scaling our organization we'll not be able to help the projects that need us.
We'll always need people in the Gofrs organization who are willing to help out, especially because each individual has something unique they can contribute. Whether they are a senior Go developer or junior, and whether they have experience maintaining open-source projects or not, there is value they bring to the table. An example is that maybe you're not too involved in Go, but you feel you can help with this website.
Part of this group's purpose is to help level up those that are newer to open source contributing, by giving them an opportunity to gain experience and learn how to be a positive open source citizen. We don't yet have any sort of formalized mentorship program, but we expect that those in the organization are willing to answer thoughtful questions and have constructive conversations. By helping those interested in growing, we further expand the types of projects we can contribute to.
We're also looking to see how we can benefit the larger Go community, and so while we have no concrete plans right now people who are interested in mentorship, teaching, or community building could be very impactful.
If helping us strengthen the Go community through package maintainership or other efforts sounds interesting to you, please consider joining our organization.
Open a new discussion here, fill in the template that's supplied, and then provide a link to your issue in the #gofrs Slack channel.
Please note: We require all users joining the organization to have two-factor authentication enabled at all times.
If you've yet to join the Slack community, you can request an invite here.
The Gofrs Logo: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: GO BUILD Image by Ashley McNamara
https://github.com/ashleymcnamara/gophers
