What is the usual time of inactivity after which my submission is considered stale?

As of September, 2025, there are no clear guidelines on what length of inactivity leads to a PR closure due to staleness. If you foresee you'll be unreachable for a prolonged duration, communicate with the EWC team member in charge of review, and they will arrange that the process is resumed upon your return.

What if an Item I use has a new version available, but it is not feature in the catalog?

Check for pull requests that may indicate the new metadata is undergoing review. If none if found, reach out to the Item maintainer to clarify if they are planning to feature the new version on the EWC Community Hub dashboard. If the response is negative or no reply reaches you you may choose to either:

1. Consume the Item directly from its source

OR

1. Fork the Item and maintain your own version

OR

1. Place support ticket asking the EWC team to assess whether it can take care of featuring the Item, on behalf of the Item owner.

What if an Item I use shows no sings of maintenance activity?

Check the Item metadata for the support level. If an update commitment was made, contact the maintainer to clarify if a new release is in the horizon, and whether they intend to feature it in the Community Hub catalog.

If contact is not possible or no reply reaches you between the response time covered by the stated support level, you may choose to either:

1. Fork the Item and maintain your own version

OR

1. Flag the Item via pull request or support ticket

If you chose the latter action, the EWC team will assess whether the item is considered orphan and is a good candidate for EWC adoption, or rather it has reach the end of life and should be delisted from the catalog.

Can I contribute with my Item but without offering support?

Yes, no support commitment is expected for Items contributed by community members. Upon submission, include in your Item metadata should the following attribute:

supportLevel: Community

This signals to EWC Users that updates will be done on a best-effort approach, without fixed release cycles, or based on the goodwill of other community members (see Prepare Your Item - Deciding on a Support Level).

How to upvote Items I use and love?

For Items hosted on GitHub or GitLab you can simply star their repository. In any other case, you may share your endorsements over the EWC discussion platform to boost visibility.

Why should I accept open source contributions only from trusted individuals/organizations?

We advise you to always review contributions thoroughly, conditioning their acceptance not only to quality but also based on whether or not they come from individuals/organizations you know and trust. Keep in mind that, with advent of agentic and generative AI, the topic of dubious issue flagging and code review fatigue has become a serious problem for open-source community in general. Have full certainty that nor the EWC or its community members are entitled to force anything change upon your contributions, and you are free to dismiss any PR you deem untraceable or ill-intended.

How do publish an update of my Item in the Community Hub?

In the event you publish a new feature, fix or simply improvement the documentation for your Item, indexing its new version directly in the EWC Community Hub Dashboard is the best way to ensue users find out what they are missing out.  To index the new version, simply update Item Metadata to reflect the relevant changes, including the increased version number, and resubmit via any of the available channels.