Repo Maintainers help steward AI team projects and ensure they remain healthy, welcoming, and moving forward. Maintainers are not expected to personally design and implement every feature, review every contribution, or make every decision. The role is primarily one of stewardship, coordination, and QA. Maintainers are encouraged to share responsibilities with other contributors and avoid becoming a bottleneck.
Responsibilities
As a Repo Maintainer, you should:
- Help triage Issues and PRs
- Ensure contributors receive timely feedback
- Encourage discussion, testing, and collaboration
- Help identify priorities and roadmap opportunities
- Foster a welcoming and constructive contributor experience
- Help ensure project documentation remains accurate and up to date
- Escalate questions or concerns to the broader AI team when needed
PR Reviews
Before merging a pull request:
- Ensure the change has received at least one code review, especially if its one that you’ve opened yourself
- Encourage testing whenever practical, particularly for user-facing changes
- Verify that any outstanding feedback has been addressed, intentionally resolved, or skipped for documented reasons
- Confirm that the contribution aligns with the project’s goals and coding standards
Maintainers should avoid self-merging significant changes without review except in urgent situations.
Releases
Repo Maintainers are responsible for coordinating releases for their projects. At this time, AI team releases require approval from a limited set of committers defined on WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ and are not eligible for automated releases. This process may evolve as additional release approvers become available.
Before publishing a release:
- Coordinate with AI team leadership as appropriate
- Include @jason_the_adams and @jeffpaul in the release process (as they have approval access on WordPress.org)
- Ensure release notes and changelog entries are prepared
- Verify that the release has received appropriate review and testing
Gaining Repo Maintainer Access
In order to gain access as a Repo Maintainer, you will need to:
- Show sufficient contribution to the respective repo via project management, PR submissions/reviews, testing, etc.
- Request access publicly in the #core-ai channel on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/ so that your request and approval from AI team leadership is done transparently
- Be a member of the WordPress GitHub organization (as a prerequisite for getting added to a WordPress team on GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged by the repository owner. https://github.com/)
- Be added to the appropriate AI repo maintainer team
Asking for Help
Repo Maintainers are not expected to carry a project alone. If your availability changes, you need additional support, or a project requires broader discussion, reach out to the AI team. Healthy projects depend on shared ownership, knowledge transfer, and active collaboration.
Related Reading
The CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. team’s post, What Does It Mean to Be a Component Maintainer?, provides additional context on stewardship, contributor mentorship, ticket triage, and project health. Many of the same principles apply to AI Team repository maintainers.
