## What are catalysts?

Catalysts are contributors that are actively helping the maintainers to maintain the repo.
They have the following qualities (among other):
- Common sense
- Initiative
- Diligence

Generally catalysts have a good understanding of the project source code. The main effort is to manage our backlog of issues and PRs. As of writing we have 300 open PRs and 500 open issues. 
> you can still be super-useful helping with organization without code-level introspection.

## What do catalysts do?
There's no clear black/white definition of what's involved here. Whatever catalyzes the stability / development / evolution of AutoGPT.

This might involve:
- keeping an eye on the #catalysts-chat on the Discord. Often a maintainer will ask for someone to take on a task
- helping with admin
    - Evaluating the merit of issues / PRs
    - Closing those that are not useful to the project
    - Labelling issues / PRs and getting them up on the Kanban
    - Adding milestones to cards (discuss on Discord if it helps)
    - Helping get/keep the kanban / roadmap in shape
    - Communicating with authors in the GitHub conversation threads (and/or here) to get the issue/PR into shape

- dev-work
    - Fixing PRs so they can be fast-track merged
    - Working with maintainers to get contributions merged

- Keeping an eye on the Discord:
    - helping out generally
    - noticing devs that that merit a Contributor badge and onboarding them
    - noticing contributors that merit a Catalyst badge and onboarding them

- Also:
    - Helping to improve this wiki
    - Helping to improve the doc
    - Whatever you can think of that helps the project. If you spot something we can do / improve, let us know!

> *This project is about Autonomy. That's the **Auto** in AutoGPT, __Autonomous agents__. If we ourselves move towards autonomy, we're using our energy best. Proactive / creative wins.*
> 
> ~ Pi, AutoGPT coordinator

If you're interested to operate as a maintainer, this is a great way to onboard -- to work with the maintainers and get the hang of how we do things -- we're still getting the hang of this ourselves).

## Catalyst Tools:
You can find serveral tools for catalyzing and maintaining [here](../Maintaining#tooling)