Strands Agents Community Health & Ecosystem Strategy

[mkmeral]

We're sharing our plans for improving the contributor experience and growing the Strands ecosystem. We'd love your feedback!

TL;DR

We've been looking at how contributors interact with Strands and we're investing in making the experience better. We're working on clearer contribution guidelines, faster response times, and making it easier to extend Strands and share what you build with the community.

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Background

Since the launch of the Strands Agents, we have seen our community grow. As we get more and more requests including issues and PRs, we wanted to make sure our contributor experience is not lacking behind. Therefore, we have analyzed contributor journeys, and how we can improve it. The full analysis is linked at the bottom if you want the details, but here's what we're planning.

What We're Planning

Below you will see list of high level items we are planning to accomplish. Please note that these are our plans for improving community health, and they are not actually implemented yet.

1. Clearer Contribution Guidelines

We want contributors to easily know what to expect before investing time whether it's fixing a bug, creating a new tool or more. We will be creating a unified contributor guide that covers what we accept, what we don't, and where different types of contributions should go.

To make this work, we will work on:

• Single entry point in docs covering all contribution types
• Clear criteria for what PRs we accept and reject
• RFC process via GitHub Discussions for larger features—get alignment before you build
• Published architectural decision records so you understand our design thinking

2. Response Time Targets

We have determined that a large source of friction is external contributors not getting responses or going a long time between review cycles; to help avoid this going forward, the team will be setting up dashboards and publishing response time targets to provide a faster feedback cycle.

To make this work, we will work on:

• Building a dashboard so maintainers can see what needs attention
• Auto-labeling items that are waiting on maintainer response
• Dedicated triage time for community PRs and issues

3. Tools & Ecosystem

We're thrilled and excited that so many people want to contribute tools/features to strands-agents/tools, but as we've continued to grow we've realized that we've hit scaling limits on what we can maintain & vend. We need Strands Agents ecosystem to expand without maintainers being a bottleneck. Therefore, we're focusing on making it easier to develop and publish Strands integrations including tools, model providers and more. Additionally, we'll work on catalogs in order to make discovering Strands components much easier.

To make this work, we will work on:

• GitHub template with CI/CD pre-configured—clone it, add your code, publish
• Community tools catalog on the docs site so people can find what you build
• Clear communication in the tools repo about the path forward

For tool PRs that have been open, we'll be closing them with an explanation and pointing to the new path.

4. Working in Public

We want to be more transparent about how we build Strands, our plans, our mental models, decisions, and more.

What this looks like:

• Public roadmap: Moving to lower level roadmap which will track actual issues we are working on
• Recorded decisions: Publishing architectural decision records so you understand our design thinking
• Working docs: Sharing planning documents (like this one) that aren't specific to code

5. Community Channel

We're exploring Discord as a real-time channel for the community. Async communication via GitHub issues works, but sometimes you need to ask a quick question or have a back-and-forth discussion.

While we set up the community channel, we're using GitHub Discussions more actively for these kinds of conversations. For example, this post is part of that effort.

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Feedback Welcome

We want this to be a conversation. Let us know what you think—are we focusing on the right things? What's missing?

See the attached files for detailed design documents:

• Contributor Story Analysis: Works backwards analysis of contributor experience
• Community Health Strategy: Sets up contributor experience goals, and defines action items
• Extensibility & Ecosystem: Defines extensibility strategy and list of action items

[mkmeral]

You can also keep track of our progress using Community Health Strategy project.