The Ibex Concierge

The Ibex Concierge is the friendly caretaker of the Ibex project. It’s a rotating duty shared by experienced contributors to help newcomers find their way around the project, and to stay on top of the various small tasks necessary to keep the project going.

The Ibex CPU project is a reasonably large open source project. Like all projects we experience two challenges: we want to lend a helping hand to new developers, answering their questions or helping them with code contributions. And we need to stay on top of our “caretaker” tasks, like fixing problems with our continuous integration setup, triaging issues and pull requests, etc. The Ibex Concierge combines these two duties in one person.

Please reach out to the Ibex Concierge if you have trouble finding your way around the Ibex project. You can find today’s Ibex Concierge in the calendar below.

Who is Ibex Concierge today?

The concierge duties rotate between several core developers on a weekly basis. You can find today’s concierge on duty in a public calendar.

• Greg Chadwick (@GregAC)

• Tom Roberts (@tomroberts-lowrisc)

• Rupert Swarbrick (@rswarbrick)

• Pirmin Vogel (@vogelpi)

• Philipp Wagner (@imphil)

You can be Ibex Concierge, too. Please talk to any of the current concierges to discuss!

Ibex Concierge duties

The Ibex Concierge is aware of what’s happening in the Ibex project, and helps to ensure that everyone feels welcome and is able to work productively. The list of duties includes, but isn’t strictly limited to the following tasks.

• Triage incoming issues and pull requests.

  • Assign labels to them.

  • Give initial feedback with an indication of what the next steps are.

  • Answer questions if possible.

  • Ask for clarifications where necessary.

  • Redirect to the right developers as needed.

• Track progress of open issues and pull requests. Ensure contributors always know what’s going on, and are informed if things take longer.

• Welcome new contributors, and provide (hands-on) help to get them up to speed. For example, help them get their commits into good shape, etc.

• Fix or coordinate fixes to necessary infrastructure, such as the continuous integration setup in a timely manner.

• Go through the list of open pull requests: ping developers if information or action is needed, close abandoned pull requests, etc.

• Assist with the review and update of open issues.

• At the end of the week, hand over to the next Ibex Concierge on the rota.

Note the obvious: it is not the job of the Ibex Concierge to fix all bugs, implement all incoming feature requests, or be available 24/7.