Flatcar Create a maintainers onboarding checklist to help new maintainers get started with the Flatcar project

One of the main challenges we face is not being fully certain about what should be included in the maintainers onboarding process. To address this, the purpose of this issue is to gather, discuss, and define all the essential topics, steps, and resources that should be part of onboarding for new maintainers.

We would love to see input and suggestions from existing maintainers about what should be added to this checklist. Please share your experiences, ideas, and what you wish you had known when you started!

Right now, this issue thread is focused on collecting and discussing all necessary items. Once we reach consensus, we will prepare a markdown onboarding template for each new maintainer to fill out.

Please add comments with suggestions or further topics to include!

Jul 18 '25 08:07 John15321

Making sure all repos have proper permissions set
Adding to CNCF service
- https://github.com/cncf/foundation/ - create a pull request (similar to https://github.com/cncf/foundation/pull/1075)
Adding to the flatcar-maintainers group on GitHub

Jul 18 '25 13:07 John15321

Add to mailing lists:
- maintainers, infra, security (private)
- users, dev

Jul 18 '25 14:07 t-lo

Infra access (CI, cloud vendors credentials for testing purposes, etc.)

Jul 21 '25 07:07 tormath1

Add access to meet.flatcar and to the calendar

Aug 05 '25 15:08 John15321

Access to youtube channel
access to shared Flatcar events calendar

Aug 05 '25 15:08 t-lo

Assign to various maintainer PR groups (depends on the person) such as flatcar-ci. nebraska-maintainers etc...

Aug 06 '25 09:08 John15321

Access to Linux Foundation Jira account
CNCF accounts

Aug 13 '25 10:08 LexiNadolski

https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/c_ii991mqrpta9en8o7ofd4v19g4%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

Add the Flatcar calendar to yours (the link not the file)

Aug 13 '25 16:08 John15321

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1canF8URl5LsdcvwoE0823O2we6wJxHtcDTbmmubmTew/edit?pli=1&authuser=2

Shouldnt all new maintainers have access to this?

from: https://github.com/flatcar/flatcar-linux-infra#:~:text=Please%20refer%20to%20Kinvolk%20Change%20Management%20procedure.

Sep 15 '25 15:09 John15321

Access to infra such as (at least on a basic read/userlevel):

Jenkins
Akamai/Linode
origin servers
GitHub runners etc

Oct 08 '25 08:10 John15321

Im thinking if we should include some knowledge sharing sessions for new maintainers? For example a session with a person A about a topic B, then a person C about a topic D etc. This would help us introduce new maintainers to the full extent of the project faster

Oct 23 '25 10:10 John15321

access to hackmd

Nov 21 '25 10:11 John15321

if a release needs to be performed - add to nebrask ro / rw groups in nebraska rp

Nov 27 '25 13:11 John15321