Contacting an Eclipse Open Source Project

Posted on 2 mins read

All Eclipse open source projects are required to operate in an open and transparent manner. This includes communication: all communication between and with the project team uses open channels. Specifically, we have no private channels for open source project work. Related, we don’t facilitate private communication between project team members and the community. If you want to connect with an Eclipse open source project team, then you need to use the designated public channels.

This presents us with something of an challenge. There are a variety of ways in which a community member can contact the project team, including (but not limited to):

  • The project’s dev list;
  • A GitHub project’s Discussion channel;
  • GitLab or GitHub issues;
  • Slack or Mattermost; or
  • A Google Group.

If we assume that most folks find the code first and then decide to connect with the project team, the best thing that an open source project can do is to tell their community exactly how to contact them in their README file, directly in their project’s Git repositories. So, if you’re looking for contact information, start there (as a general rule, do not send committers email directly).

At least some folks find their way to contact an open source project is to ask the Eclipse Foundation, either by sending us an email request, or by using our website to discover the answer for themselves. To provide answers here, we depend on project teams specifying their preferred communication channels in the project metadata (via Project Management Interface).