Proposal for Meshery's Participation in Hacktoberfest 2025

[Yash Sharma]

All Meshery Maintainers and community managers,

I hope this email finds you well. With Hacktoberfest 2025 approaching (typically running throughout October), I'd like to propose that we actively participate as maintainers and make Meshery a welcoming destination for open source contributors during this October.

Proposed Participation Strategy

1. Repository Preparation

There are few steps needed to help ensure Meshery's repo is ready to participate.

• Ensuring all Meshery repos have a "hacktoberfest" topic.
• Review and label issues appropriately with:
• "good first issue" for newcomers
• "hacktoberfest" for Hacktoberfest-specific contributions
• Reviewing all Meshery repos for Hacktoberfest readiness
• Here are all good-first-issues and many of them are old issues which might have been closed or not updated with latest information. 
• Updated contributor readme, which I think we already have

Implementation Steps

Phase 1: Launch (Early October)

1. Official announcement: Blog post / social media / community channels. Early announcement will help with engagement and more participation
2. Issue labeling: Apply appropriate labels to curated issues
3. Community event: We should organise an hour-long community event, similar to last year. 

Phase 2: Active Management (Throughout October)

I think newcomers meeting is a great place to actively review PRs of newcomers, or help them with sessions on how to engage in Meshery. Which is why I would like to propose to follow our previous approach where we used to add multiple issues in newcomers meetings minutes and help newcomers raise their hand to take them, and during upcoming four newcomers meetings through October we can encourage them to consistently join this meeting to get review and new issues assigned.

However, considering that, we also need to ensure we are helping right contributors participate to avoid spam PRs and helping our maintainers from getting burned out from reviewing spam PRs. To do so, here are a few things to consider.

• We can avoid assigning big, or urgent issues to newcomers.
• We can ping the assignee after a certain period of time in the issue, if no response comes we will reassign the issue.

Please checkout participation page for more details by Hacktoberfest for maintainers, and how we can participate.

Phase 3: Follow-up (November)

1. Contributor recognition: Acknowledge and thank all participants, also assigning Layer5 Hacktoberfest badge.
2. Retention efforts: Invite quality contributors to join as regular contributors, and Meshery dev meeting.

Success Metrics

To consider we are successful during this event, here are few metrics I think we can consider:

• Number of new quality contributors
• Number of merged PRs
• Contributor retention post-Hacktoberfest

Next Steps

I can help with coordination to move forward, all community managers and Meshmates are encouraged to raise their hands to participate and help. Sections which will need help with are below.

• Posting about Meshery's participation in Hacktoberfest through Meshery's official social channel.
• Issue triage, creation and labeling with "hacktoberfest" and "good-first-issue" labels.
• Helping organise hacktoberfest kickoff event.

Notes: I was thinking for non code contributors, we can create issues which can mention creating certain designs on Meshery and getting them published. This way, we can help contributors learn more about Meshery and how to use it. Additionally we will get a number of new designs published as well.

Please share your thoughts, concerns, and availability for supporting this initiative.

Looking forward to your feedback and hopefully a successful Hacktoberfest 2025!

Best regards, 

Yash Sharma

Meshery Maintainer

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Additional Resources:

• Hacktoberfest Official Website
• Maintainer Resources
• Best Practices for Maintainers

[Lee Calcote]

Hi Yash,

I love the fact that you're considering pre, during, and post event activities, and the aim to attract and retain long-term contributors. You also mentioned how we can facilitate low and non-code contributions via Meshery Designs. This fits in perfectly with this year's theme of "Designing with Meshery". To put a finer point on that here are three low/non-code activities that we can readily facilitate:

- Meshery Designs - creating, exporting, and publishing to the Meshery Catalog

   - Designs that only contain annotations for architectural diagrams 

   - Designs that contain configurable and deployable components. 

- Meshery Models - creating, exporting, and publishing to the Meshery Catalog

   - Models that only contain annotations for architectural diagrams 

   - Models that contain configurable and deployable components. 

- Lee

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Layer5

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[Yash Sharma]

Hi Lee,

Designing with Meshery sounds like a really good theme, I think you articulated very well in the points as well. As one of example I created this issue yesterday which I'll be working on in the meantime

Best

- Yash