Introduction to the Node.js Community Committee and Our Focus for 2018

Hello! My name is Olivia Hugger, and I’m a member of the Node.js Foundation Community Committee. What’s the Community Committee? Well, that’s what I’ll be discussing in this blog through an overview of why we started and what function we serve within the Node.js community. This blog also covers major initiatives we accomplished in 2017, and what we are hoping to achieve this year.

Who are we?

There’s a fair chance you may have never heard of the Community Committee, and that would be because we’re a fairly new group — established at the beginning of 2017. We’re a top-level committee (meaning on the same hierarchical level as the Technical Steering Committee) that’s tasked with everything outward facing and related to work that needs to be done on the community side of the Node.js project. Basically, if the TSC is responsible for the code side of the project, then we’re responsible for the community side.

We mainly focus on interacting with our community and helping it grow, as well as engaging with underrepresented groups and figuring out the best ways for folks to get started with Node.js.

This was a grassroots initiative formed by people, from the community who wanted to get more people engaged in the Node.js project itself.

Most of our work is being done over GitHub, at the community-committee repository.

What we’ve done in 2017

2017 was a formative year. We focused on trying to get a stable foothold within all of the other things happening in the project. This has proven to be really tricky, but with enough time and dedication from our amazing members, we finally figured out our place within the project and what we can do to support the Node.js Foundation. Additionally, there are no real similar cases within other large open-source projects we could take inspiration from, so a lot of it was going around and asking “hey, would this work for us?”

Definitely one of the hardest things we encountered and are still encountering to this day was the issue of defining what being a “non-technical contributor” encompasses, which is much harder when you have a gigantic project to base it on. If I had to put in my own words, I’d say we spent 2017 finding our own space to fit in within the project, and expanded on that space once we found it by defining core values and strategies important to us.

What we’re doing in 2018

Now that we’ve found a stable footing, we are kickstarting a lot of really exciting initiatives. Below, I’ve listed a few; if any look like they are interesting to you, please let us know and we can help get you started.

Internationalization: Making Node.js More Accessible to Non-English Speakers
2018 will hopefully be the year where the Internationalization (=Translation) efforts are going to be restarted, which first begun back in io.js times and kind of just stopped a couple of months after convergence. There’s already a fairly detailed plan drawn up to kick this back into gear, and I hope that 2018 will be the year where the entirety of Node.js will first be translated.

Website Redesign: We Are Listening to You :)
Another really exciting project we’re working on is the redesign of the https://nodejs.org website. It’s been looking more or less the same for about four years now, and there are numerous issues that people are reporting with the current design. Granted, this has been attempted at least two times in the past. However, we finally have the structure and resources to fully organize this, and I’m very excited to start seeing the results.

The End User Feedback Loop: How Can We Get Better?
We’ve also kicked off two initiatives that should provide the project with feedback from outside users via the Node.js End User Feedback Initiative, and the Enterprise Advisory Group, which is focused on enterprise users of Node.js. These groups intend to get meaningful feedback in order to improve Node.js Core software and also the community itself.

Mentorships: Building Our Contributors and Node.js Users
Something we’ve been working on in 2017 too that I think will really see the light of day this year is project-organized mentoring/learning efforts. Not only do we finally have a plan to do mentoring sessions with the goal of helping people get into contributing to the project, we’re also hoping to further organize in-person meetups with the same goal.

This already happened a bunch in 2017 with the Code + Learn initiatives (and with great success!). The goal of Code + Learns is to help folks get started (or go further) with their contributions to Node.js core. Experienced contributors to the Node.js project help guide you through your first few commits to Node.js core — it’s a great way to get confident with contributing and meet a lot of cool folks working with Node.js.

As a part of this too, we want to re-launch NodeTogether, a series of free meetups to bring people from underrepresented groups together to learn Node.js.

That’s some of the most interesting and impactful things we have planned for this year. I expect this year to see a slow change to a less hierarchical system of power within the project, something that the Community Committee was also established for. Lastly, who knows what this year will bring? I’m sure there will be lots of exciting new things we still haven’t thought of.

Getting Involved

If any of the things described above sound interesting to you, you have the opportunity to get involved! In general, if there’s anything you’re unsure or unclear about, you can open an issue in the community-committee repository, or send an email to commcomm at iojs dot org. Otherwise, here’s some links to the projects discussed:

• Internationalization: https://github.com/nodejs/i18n
• Website Redesign: https://github.com/nodejs/website-redesign
• User Feedback: https://github.com/nodejs/user-feedback
• Enterprise Advisory Group: https://github.com/nodejs/enterprise-advisory-group