chore(docs): update contributor wording and support channel info

[hanshuebner]

Summary

• add community pledge
• update support channel information and social links

Checklist

• The Pull Request has tests
• A changelog file has been added to CHANGELOG/unreleased/kong or adding skip-changelog label on PR if unnecessary. README.md
• There is a user-facing docs PR against https://github.com/Kong/docs.konghq.com - PUT DOCS PR HERE

[nowNick]

I like the honesty of this pledge! I left a tiny comment but more as an idea / inspiration. It looks good to me already 👏

[nowNick]

I like the professional and honest wording of this paragraph however to me personally it stands out a little bit from the rest of this doc where we have phrasings like: "We welcome contributions of all kinds" or "tasks are noble and worthy".

I wonder if changing the order of sentences makes it more aligned with the doc sentiment. What do you think of this?:

We are thrilled to work with the community and we have a strong desire to accommodate and support open source users and contributors effectively. However since we also operate as commercial entity we face the bitter challenge of balancing community work with the interest of Kong Inc.

[teb510]

re: "We make many of the enhancements to Kong Gateway in the
Community Edition, and thus they become available to the open source
community even before our commercial customers get them" <<-- this isn't strictly true is it? we often release a new EE version before the OSS version don't we? suggest we remove this (and it also conflicts with what we tell enterprise customers....). AFAIK we either release OSS/EE at the same time OR EE is slightly ahead of OSS

[hanshuebner]

@nowNick I'm going to tone down the invitation to contribute a bit. It comes from six years ago, when Kong was primarily managed as Open Source project, and I agree that it does not quite align with what we're now pledging.

@teb510 Most enhancements become available in the open source repository first, but I understand your point and will change the wording.

[hanshuebner]

@teb510 It now reads "We make many of the enhancements to Kong Gateway in the
Community Edition, so our open source community directly benefits from
the commercial work that we do."

[StarlightIbuki]

The most important information for the contributor to notice would be the 7-day policy and ticket-closing policy. Should we outline and stress them?

[StarlightIbuki]

Are we going to have a hard standard to consider a ticket stale? I'm OK with either having discretionary power or not.

[hanshuebner]

I have added this:

We automatically close issues and pull requests for which we do not get responses to our questions or update requests within 3 weeks.

[StarlightIbuki]

Just to add to this PR, I also want to include some suggestions for the contributors (maybe "best practices"?).
For example, smaller PRs are more likely to get reviewed soon. And maybe we could reveal some of our processes when reviewing the RP.

[hanshuebner]

Feel free to contribute fixes or minor features by opening a Pull
Request. Small contributions are more likely to be merged quicker
than changes which require a lot of time to review. If you are
planning to develop a larger feature, please talk to us first in the
GitHub Discussions
section!

Does this suffice?

[hanshuebner]

@StarlightIbuki I've put the Community Pledge into a separate document that is linked to from the pull request and issue template as well as from the contributor document. It contains some more details about our closing policy, too.