# CfgMgmtCamp 2026: Community and Contributor Summit **URL:** \ **Category:** Blog\ **Tags:** cfgmgmgtcamp, event-slides, rhel, ansible-lint, galaxy-ng\ **Created:** [February 16, 2026, 10:48am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/cfgmgmtcamp-2026-community-and-contributor-summit/45347 "2026-02-16T10:48:12Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![dbrennand](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/ansible/user_avatar/forum.ansible.com/dbrennand/32/7830_2.png) [@dbrennand](https://forum.ansible.com/u/dbrennand)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2026, 10:48am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/cfgmgmtcamp-2026-community-and-contributor-summit/45347/1 "2026-02-16T10:48:12Z")
# CfgMgmtCamp 2026: Community and Contributor Summit This post is part of a series of talks presented at CfgMgmtCamp 2026. Please see [CfgMgmtCamp](https://forum.ansible.com/t/cfgmgmtcamp-2026-overview/45340) for all other talks. ### Ansible - State of the Community Speakers: John “gundalow” Barker and Don Naro Slides: [Presentation](https://cfp.cfgmgmtcamp.org/media/ghent2026/submissions/PES9FE/resources/Talk__Ansible_-_State_of_the_Community_Feb_2026_mw4GC2a.pdf) Video: [YouTube](https://youtu.be/fQ5bEdWgVeo) As one of the big events on the Ansible Community calendar, CfgMgmtCamp is an opportunity to get together and review how we’re doing as a community. This talk is aimed at anyone with an interest in Ansible, as all voices are welcome in the discussion of how to shape the community in the coming year. ### How we opened up Ansible’s documentation infrastructure to the community Speaker: Don Naro Slides: [Presentation](https://cfp.cfgmgmtcamp.org/media/ghent2026/submissions/TTBHGC/resources/How_we_opened_up_Ansibles_documentation_infrastru_ZVaRmUu.pdf) Video: [YouTube](https://youtu.be/R3jlJmve1fs) The Ansible community team at Red Hat work to dismantle closed infrastructure and open up workloads and processes to community contributors. Join me to hear how we moved from locked-down Jenkins jobs to transparent, community-managed GitHub workflows. I’ll share how we navigated the technical challenges of migrating a truly chonky Sphinx build process, preserved a decade of SEO authority, and scored some major quality improvements by providing contributor access. It all started at an Ansible contributor summit at CfgMgmtCamp 2023 too! So please join me as I share what we learned about infrastructure, trust, and some unexpected ways investment in OSS can unlock community potential. #### Talk Notes Dependency challenges initially. Lost reasoning for why certain versions were pinned in requirements.txt files. Dependency pinning strategy: - Keep production builds stable. - Create tested and relaxed dependencies. - Don’t force users to install pinned dependencies. - Bump dependencies automatically. Using nox to help with test automation - linting documentation for any formatting issues. Ansible documentation bot for engaging with the community contributing to documentation. Implemented patchback for backporting certain pieces of documentation. Reducing manual maintainer burden. ### Ansible Community & Partner Engineering updates Speakers: Don Naro and John “gundalow” Barker Slides: [Presentation](https://cfp.cfgmgmtcamp.org/media/ghent2026/submissions/HPHLRM/resources/Contributor_Summit__CPE_intro_and_goals_for_2026_AILFvBp.pdf) Video: [YouTube](https://youtu.be/TeF2RGTB4zc) Don and Gundalow share updates from the community and partner engineering team at Red Hat and delve into our plans for the year ahead. Ahead of our Contributor Summit we [announced on the forum](https://forum.ansible.com/t/cfgmgmtcamp-2026/44250/24) that the Community and Partner Engineering team plan to collaboratively define some of the work to take on in the year ahead. The Ansible Community Engineering team at Red Hat has always strived to empower our contributors and help community developers and maintainers get things done. We started the morning session with an overview of the Community and Partner Engineering team at Red Hat to give contributors a better understanding of the team and where we’ve got to now that it has been more than a year since we combined two Red Hat teams. That led us into a conversation with folks both in the room and virtually around these high-level goals: - Focus on content quality - Improve content discovery and user adoption - Reduce maintainer burden - Act as open source champions (champions as in facilitators, not “winners”) During this session the Community and Partner Engineering team gained some valuable insights from our community to help us shape our goals and define priorities. Over the coming weeks we’ll be sharing more of our plans on the forum as we digest all the feedback and thoughts we’ve gathered. #### Talk Notes - Certified collection workflow process. How does it work? Is it a manual or automated process? A mixture of both? - Centralise GitHub Action workflows across different repositories into[github.com/ansible-content-actions](https://github.com/ansible/ansible-content-actions)? - Missing documentation around Zuul CI used for publishing community namespace collections to Galaxy. - Who is the Point of Contact for Zuul CI build issues? - [GitHub - ansible-community/ansible.content\_builder: A collection to scaffold Ansible plugins.](https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible.content_builder) moving this functionality to the ansible-creator utility. - ansible-galaxy CLI tool with requirements.yml adding an update command or --update flag to update collections which do have updates available. Right now the only way to do this is to use the --force flag on install which causes all collections to be re-installed. - [ansible/galaxy](https://github.com/ansible/galaxy/) repository should be archived. Pending removal of namespace requests to[forum.ansible.com](http://forum.ansible.com) - Add to the repositories README.md file mentioning this to avoid confusion. Mention that the repository is not for the ansible-galaxy CLI either. That should be raised in ansible/ansible. ##### Improve content discovery and user adoption - [galaxy.ansible.com](http://galaxy.ansible.com) UX improvements: - Ansible Collections - Last tested with Ansible Core version? Last linted via ansible-lint? - Add ansible-lint results to the collection overview. - Exposing CI results from the collection repository to Galaxy. - Scoring system? - Favorite collections on Galaxy to see your favorite collections on Galaxy homepage. - Can we add a count for how many people have clicked on the documentation? Usage / consumption statistics for collection maintainers to see. - A label on Galaxy that the collection is included in the Ansible Community package. - Filter for collections containing plugins or roles etc. ##### Reduce maintainer burden - argument\_spec.yml potential review and maybe improvements? - Better documentation rendering for collections on Galaxy. - Community AI agent skills for helping with maintainer burdening tasks. Could these go into the[collection\_template](https://github.com/ansible-collections/collection_template/)? ##### Act as open source champions - Let the community know when it’s not going well. If it breaks, it happens, we’re working on it, expecting an ETA on fix, Root Cause Analysis would be nice etc. - Signal to noise ratio, forum tag for critical-service-status. Using maybe[Gatus](https://github.com/TwiN/gatus) or[Uptime Kuma](https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma) for the status page for[docs.ansible.com](http://docs.ansible.com),[galaxy.ansible.com](http://galaxy.ansible.com) etc. - ➡ Forum Post:[Ansible Community Status page & Notifications](https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-community-status-page-notifications/45253) ##### Other - Security scanning / Static Application Security Testing, Software Composition Analysis scanning? (Dependency vulnerabilities). ### Open Discussion: Good, bad and ugly Speakers: Felix Fontein and Matt Davis Forum Post: [Problems in the Ansible world and how to improve on them](https://forum.ansible.com/t/cfgmgmtcamp-2026-discussion-0-12-problems-in-the-ansible-world-and-how-to-improve-on-them/45300) Video: [YouTube](https://youtu.be/FeRj3AUYmgI) felixfontein and nitzmahone lead an open discussion about the state of things in Ansible and how we can improve. #### Topics ##### Support for Python versions Support for Python versions. Managing RHEL 8 / Alma 8 / Older Debian LTS version you might find out that the latest Ansible core versions are unusable because they require newer versions of Python to be installed on the Managed Node. - RHEL packaging the bindings for packaging multiple versions of Python, not just the system Python. - Possible to target multiple versions of Python - Ansible Core 2.21 - Tiny c types wrapper around libdnf and that is implemented into the Ansible DNF module. - Still would need a supported Python version of the Mangaed Node (target). - When is this going to be supported for certified content / system roles? - To be determined. - [Support core packaging operations against older python versions by sivel · Pull Request #86432 · ansible/ansible · GitHub](https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/86432) ##### Ansible 2.9 Templating Changes (data tagging) - Data Tagging: Changes to trust model and templating changes, boolean(ish) values are now disallowed. In general it is a good thing because it makes templating more consistent. More consistent typing. - Huge feature and seemed like it was not tested very well. Red Hat maintained collections which were broken, long talk against pre-releases. Example: ansible.netcommon was broken and required changes in core but core was already released so it was a bad experience for the community. ansible.netcommon is now testing against devel now. - Introduce a requirement to test against the devel branch? ACTION: Discussion with the Ansible Steering Committee. ##### INJECT\_FACTS\_AS\_VARS - [Forum Post](https://forum.ansible.com/t/inject-facts-as-vars-is-defaulting-to-false-in-2-24/44886) - Being changed without communication as to why this is happening. Better communication for breaking changes. Changed due to a security problem and can cause variable collisions. Was pending data tagging being implemented to make this change. - ACTION: Follow up with Nitz to see which embedded docs/troubleshooting pages are still in ansible-core and ensure they still work (grep for docs URLs in core) - Might need a short URL for permalink errors - Maybe docs should also link to Forum - Discussion area for the core team to communicate changes? ansible-core tag and announcement maybe? ##### Collection maintainers when deprecating content - Collection maintainers when deprecating content in their collection to make sure you link to these issues and pull requests. In the changelog fragment link to the PR for more context for the users. Use deprecation messages so when a user running ansible-playbook can have a message for more context as to why it’s being removed. - Record Architectural Decision Records in the collection so that if someone wants to go through and find out why something was deprecated they can read about that and why it was changed. - Subdomain for redirects. Having these redirects stored in a GitHub repository and could be contributed by the community. Submit a PR to add a new redirect so it doesn’t matter if the documentation is moved it doesn’t matter. It will link to the correct location. - Forum tag for these kind of specific discussions. - Where could these kind of documents be stored? In the collection itself? Could there be a standard around this inside collections? Like in the meta/ directory with a specific file name. - Concern: If we make it too complicated for collection maintainers it won’t get used. Need to carefully consider the solutions. ##### Warnings & Deprecation Messages - Warnings & Deprecation messages: Being able to disable specific ones. Maybe making certain ones errors rather than warnings. - 2.19 standardised the error and warning controls in Ansible Core. Assign IDs to the warnings and collections could do the same for their modules. Hopefully some new features are upcoming in new Ansible Core versions. - Being able to get a count of the number of deprecation warnings have occurred. - Error as warning, warning as error in Ansible Core 2.19. - Capture warnings and correlate them to tasks. Accessible in task results, or register a variable. Improvement for integration testing, can check that a warning has occurred now. - ACTION: Contact nitz if they could create a forum post about this warnings and errors as warnings. ##### Ideas & followups - Does it fix the issue with newer versions of Ansible Core not supporting RHEL 8 for example? - Yes, this is a pattern that the core team is trying out and if successful could be implemented by collection maintainers too. As a user: - [Supported Python versions, or: supporting older Operating Systems](https://forum.ansible.com/t/45288) - [Big changes don’t seem to be properly tested](https://forum.ansible.com/t/45289) - [Big breaking changes come with no explanation of why they are happening](https://forum.ansible.com/t/45290) - [Speaking about deprecations (and warnings in general)](https://forum.ansible.com/t/45291) - [Supported ansible-core versions when installing collections](https://forum.ansible.com/t/45292) - [Collection documentation on Ansible Galaxy is incomplete and partially confusing](https://forum.ansible.com/t/45293) As a collection maintainer and developer: - [Collection testing is still a mess](https://forum.ansible.com/t/45294) - [Instant Ansible-test target updates without announcements](https://forum.ansible.com/t/45295) - [Deprecations and ansible-test](https://forum.ansible.com/t/45296) - [Publishing community collections, and Zuul](https://forum.ansible.com/t/45297) - [Features are removed without public discussion or known good reason](https://forum.ansible.com/t/45298) - [Deprecation of behavior before providing alternatives](https://forum.ansible.com/t/45299) ### Bullhorn, Meetup, Release Calendar & Social Media Speakers: Anwesha Das and John “gundalow” Barker Slides: [Presentation](https://cfp.cfgmgmtcamp.org/media/ghent2026/submissions/HPHLRM/resources/Contributor_Summit__Bullhorn_Meetup_Social_Promot_6E48V6t.pdf) Video: [YouTube](https://youtu.be/ilkpnigmiMw) @anwesha and @gundalow discuss Bullhorn improvements, release calendar sync, meetup strategy, and other topics related to communication and promotion of the Ansible community. #### Talk Notes ##### Bullhorn - Quarterly edition of the Bullhorn? - Maybe pinning certain announcements for a few weeks on the forum? Would that be too much? Maybe… - Discussion announcements are very useful in the bullhorn. - Major releases / changes to Ansible Core, having those posts included in the bullhorn are very useful. - Matrix barrier for entry for the bullhorn: - Forum - Discourse to Matrix bridge. Open Source project. - Forum - Email to Matrix bridge. Open Source project. - Email to an email address & then arrives in Matrix and then could be included in the bullhorn. - Forum Event for that specific edition of the bullhorn and then all replies to that event are added to that edition. - Ansible Collections - GitHub releases - Subscribe to releases only and have those notifications be included in the bullhorn? - ➡ Forum Post: [Bullhorn content quality improvement proposals](https://forum.ansible.com/t/bullhorn-content-quality-improvement-proposals/45321) ##### Ansible Meetups - Meetups - Ansible is now on Meetup Pro - ➡ Forum Post:[https://forum.ansible.com/t/github-repo-for-slides-for-meetups/45281](https://forum.ansible.com/t/github-repo-for-slides-for-meetups/45281) ### The exploitation paradox in open source Speaker: Richard Fontana Slides: [Presentation](https://cfp.cfgmgmtcamp.org/media/ghent2026/submissions/KP9YPK/resources/slides-fontana-cfgmgmtcamp2026_GW81j66.pdf) Video: [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/live/nweHLZNs_jQ?si=Fql2qBjbff7AsSo3&t=5217) Open source has always balanced freedom and power. Each era, from the rise of Linux to the cloud to generative AI, reveals the same flaw and the same strength: ideals built to maximize liberty inevitably create new leverage points. This talk traces that recurring pattern and argues that open source’s periodic crises are not failures but feedback loops, teaching us how to keep freedom alive in changing infrastructures. * * * Check out the other sessions at CfgMgmtCamp 2026 using the links below: - [CfgMgmtCamp 2026: Content Development and Collection Maintenance](https://forum.ansible.com/t/cfgmgmtcamp-2026-content-development-and-collection-maintenance/45341) - [CfgMgmtCamp 2026: AI and Automation](https://forum.ansible.com/t/cfgmgmtcamp-2026-ai-and-automation/45342) - [CfgMgmtCamp 2026: IT Architecture](https://forum.ansible.com/t/cfgmgmtcamp-2026-it-architecture/45343) - [CfgMgmtCamp 2026: Integration and Tooling](https://forum.ansible.com/t/cfgmgmtcamp-2026-integration-and-tooling/45344) - [CfgMgmtCamp 2026: Ansible Core 2.19](https://forum.ansible.com/t/cfgmgmtcamp-2026-ansible-core-2-19/45345) - [CfgMgmtCamp 2026: Ansible Ecosystem](https://forum.ansible.com/t/cfgmgmtcamp-2026-ansible-ecosystem/45346) - [CfgMgmtCamp 2026: Community and Contributor Summit](https://forum.ansible.com/t/cfgmgmtcamp-2026-community-and-contributor-summit/45347) Here are links to all the talks on YouTube as well as related forum discussions: - All Ansible talks on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0FmYCf7ocrbTZOpWE01ubyKl4-_np8jy) - All CfgMgmtCamp [Forum Posts](https://forum.ansible.com/tag/cfgmgmgtcamp?ascending=false&order=activity) - [CfgMgmtCamp 2026 Event Post](https://forum.ansible.com/t/cfgmgmtcamp-2026/44250)