---
title: "Community Expectations"
weight: 17
description: |
  Expectations of conduct and code review that govern all members of the
  community.
---

Kubernetes is a community project. 
Consequently, it is wholly dependent on its community to provide a productive, friendly and collaborative environment.

The first and foremost goal of the Kubernetes community is to develop orchestration
technology that radically simplifies the process of creating reliable
distributed systems. 
However a second, equally important goal is the creation
of a community that fosters easy, agile development of such orchestration
systems.

We therefore describe the expectations for members of the Kubernetes community. 
This document is intended to be a living one that evolves as the community evolves via the same PR and code review process that shapes the rest of the project.
It currently covers the expectations of conduct that govern all members of the community as well as the expectations around code review that govern all active contributors to Kubernetes.

## Code review

As a community we believe in the value of code review for all contributions.
Code review increases both the quality and readability of our codebase, which
in turn produces high quality software.

See the [pull request documentation](/contributors/guide/pull-requests.md) for more information on code review.

Consequently, as a community we expect that all active participants in the
community will also be active reviewers. 
The [community membership](/community-membership.md) outlines the responsibilities
of the different contributor roles. 

Expect reviewers to request that you avoid [common go style
mistakes](https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/CodeReviewComments) in your PRs.

## Expectations of reviewers: Review comments

Because reviewers are often the first points of contact between new members of
the community and can significantly impact the first impression of the
Kubernetes community, reviewers are especially important in shaping the
Kubernetes community.  
Reviewers are highly encouraged to not only abide by the [code of conduct](/governance.md#code-of-conduct) but are strongly encouraged to go above and beyond the code of conduct to promote a collaborative, respectful Kubernetes community.

## Expectations of reviewers: Review latency

Reviewers are expected to respond in a timely fashion to PRs that are assigned
to them.
Reviewers are expected to respond to an *active* PRs with reasonable latency, and if reviewers fail to respond, those PRs may be assigned to other reviewers.

If reviewers are unavailable to review for some time, they are expected to set their [user status](https://help.github.com/en/articles/personalizing-your-profile#setting-a-status) to "busy" so that the bot will not request reviews from them on new PRs automatically. 
If they are unavailable for a longer period of time, they are expected to remove themselves from the OWNERS file and potentially nominate someone else.

*Active* PRs are considered those which have a proper CLA (`cla:yes`) label
and do not need rebase to be merged.
PRs that do not have a proper CLA, or require a rebase are not considered active PRs.

## Thanks

Many thanks in advance to everyone who contributes their time and effort to
making Kubernetes both a successful system as well as a successful community.
The strength of our software shines in the strengths of each individual
community member.  
Thanks!
