Open Source Summit North America 2017

On a large open source project like Zulip, we were starting to see major productivity problems for the project, caused by longstanding limitations in GitHub’s permissions and notifications systems. Learn how we created zulipbot, an open source GitHub workflow bot written in Node.js, that patches these limitations in GitHub’s model and how you can use it to manage your own GitHub projects and organizations. zulipbot creates a significantly more democratic workflow for our contributors, allowing them to claim issues, manage labels, and transition from new contributors to being the maintainer of their portion of a busy open source project, even if they’re a volunteer with only a bit of free time. While in part, zulipbot is a workaround for GitHub limitations (that GitHub should probably just fix for everyone), it also is a tool that gives maintainers control over how their project works.