Maintainers

Maintainers grow and nurture courses, taking responsibility for their initial shape and structure, and their continuing evolution.

A course's creator is also its first maintainer. Once a course exists, there's no difference in the responsibilities and powers of that creator and those of maintainers added later.

Who Should Maintain?

Maintaining a course is a long term responsibility, with a strong community focus. It's a great opportunity to explore a particular topic and type of learning experience and work to improve it over time.

• You should be committed to the course and interested in building a learning community around it.
• You do not have to be an expert in a topic to create, maintain, or facilitate a course.
• Maintainers will typically also facilitate course cohorts, though it's not a hard requirement.

Club Maintainers are free to take the same approach, developing and running multiple cohorts over time. But expectations are a bit looser — you can try a club once and see how it goes, without committing to ongoing maintenance.

Maintainer Responsibilities

Add Maintainers

• For now, email us to add a new maintainer. Include their username or email — they'll need a Hyperlink account, so make sure they've signed up first!
• Eventually, we'll have a process for adding course facilitators without giving them full maintainer powers. For now, the only way to add a new facilitator to the course is to add them as a maintainer.
• Looking for more facilitators? Post requirements for facilitating and the best way to reach you at the bottom of the curriculum. Come up with an application and interview process if you need one.

Facilitate Course Cohorts

• Check out the Facilitator Guide for more about how this works!

Maintain and Improve the Curriculum

• You should aim to update and improve the course curriculum over time. Consider creating a CHANGELOG topic on the course forum, to record how the course evolves.
• Every cohort is an opportunity for a course to improve. One of the final steps in facilitating a cohort is to gather feedback with a Retrospective on the course forum. Do your best to review and act on any feedback that might improve the course for future cohorts.

Administer the Course Forum

• Each course comes with its own forum, a public discussion space separate from the private forum communities for each cohort.
• This space is useful for collecting Artifacts and Retrospectives from each cohort, and is also a great space for any general conversation around the course topic — from sharing interesting readings to suggesting improvements to the course structure.