Focus areas:
- Supporting people with their package creation
- Helping people use packages
- Helping people contribute to packages
- Gathering feedback, promotion, celebrating contributions and content creation
- Ensuring the package format evolves with the new changes to the CMS
Roadmap:
We have a roadmap that will be continuously updated. It can be found on the Umbraco.Packages issue tracker.
Goals:
- To promote packages as a first-class citizen
- To provide and maintain clear structure and development guidelines
- To help and encourage new and returning package developers
- To ensure a transparent and open collaboration and exchange with the HQ dev team and the other community teams
- To improve the usability of the Our package section
Main activities:
- Maintaining documentation on how to create a package, best practices and tackling common problems as a package developer
- Organizing and holding bi-weekly follow-up online meetings - discuss the current state of the package repositories, potential improvements, and plans going forward. (The meeting notes are publicly available)
- Writing and publishing follow-up and updates blog posts on umbraco.com
- Developing and maintaining open source tools that benefits package developers
- Participating in hackathons, panel discussions, meetups, and conferences/festivals to assist new package developers, talk about the structure of the team, achievements, and future goals
Let's meet the team!
- Jesper Mayntzhusen (Umbraco HQ - Denmark)
- Lotte Pitcher (United Kingdom)
- Nik Rimington (United Kingdom)
- Richard Ockerby (United Kingdom)
- Kevin Jump (United Kingdom)
- Dave Woestenborghs (Belgium)
- David Brendel (Germany)

Communication:
- The team uses a dedicated Slack channel to communicate, and the issue tracker to comment and follow-up on tasks. In-person meetings are scheduled twice a year:
- May- Around Codegarden
- November - Team visit to HQ
Getting in touch with the Team:
- To ask questions or share remarks, the Packages Issue Tracker is the recommended channel to use.
- For those who don’t have a Github account, they can send an email to packages@umbraco.com
- We also have a Package Team Twitter account!
Joining the Team:
- An online application will be open once a year, typically in autumn.
- Ad hoc appointments can be made in case a team member chooses to step down.
HQ support and role:
- Appointed a steward to work as a half time job
- Ensure transparency and visibility
- Support where relevant
- Provide financial support for travel and accommodations to participate in meetings and events
Structure:
- The team is ideally organized as a group of currently 7 members:
- 1 HQ employee - Steward
- 6 community volunteers
- With a team lead, Steward, in the center, the team is organized around fulfilling different roles according to the skillset and preferences of each.
The Steward’s role is focused on:
- Facilitating for the team
- Providing the necessary support to the different members
- Coordinating with the HQ dev team and the stewards of the other community teams
Second version. Published in November 2019. Revised in November 2020.