Contributed module maintainers role/responsibilities

The Community Working Group has recently been dealing with a number of people who are sometimes frustrated at the lack of response from contributed module maintainers, particularly for support requests.

We were discussing in our meeting that it would be really helpful to define the responsibilities of a maintainer more clearly. We did a search to check if we could find such a document but it wasn't forthcoming - maybe people know of existing documentation, or of pieces that could be brought together to form it. If not this would really help to refer people to when people have not received the expected response from a maintainer.

Within that descriptions of general responsibilities, definitions of the activity levels "Actively Maintained, Under active development" etc. which could be tool-tipped so that people understand what to expect. Also a link through to the Code of Conduct would be an important addition.

So to summarise:

• When people are complaining about the response time/level of a maintainer, we have some documentation that states what they should expect
• When maintainers take on the role, they have some documentation that tells them what is going to be expected of them

If this exists then it would be great if someone could point us in the right direction, otherwise it'd be great to think of the best way to approach this! Thoughts appreciated!

CWG hat off for a second, from a personal side I think there should be a distinction between "Support" and "Maintenance" and that therefore a Maintainer is responsible for ensuring that the code is safe, submitted patches are committed etc. but support requests are not obligatory to respond to and are a community responsibility. Just a thought but thats how I see it - maybe different people view it differently so maybe not the place for that discussion.