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+## Maintainer Guide
+
+This document documents best practises and guidelines for *collectd*
+maintainers.
+
+### Ideology
+
+As maintainer of an open-source project, you are one of the most knowledgable
+people of the project's structure, best practices, goals, etc. You are most
+helping the project by *facilitating change*, in other words "help contributors
+make changes to the codebase."
+
+The most common form of helping users is doing *code reviews* and (eventually)
+using your commit rights to merge the pull request.
+
+### Code reviews
+
+*   Be friendly, especially with new contributors. Write "Hi" and thank them for their contribution before diving into review comments.
+*   Criticize code, not people. Ideally, tell the contributor a better way to do what they need.
+*   Clearly mark optional suggestions as such. Best practise, start your comment with *At your option: …*
+*   Wait for a successful run of our [continuous integration system](https://ci.collectd.org/) before merging.
+
+### Repository access
+
+You have write access to the *collectd/collectd* repository. Please use it
+responsibly.
+
+#### Own work
+
+Open *pull requests* for your own changes, too:
+
+*   For simple changes it's okay to self-approve and merge after a
+    successful build on the CI systems.
+*   Trivial changes, cherry-picks from *master* and roll-up merges are
+    excempt and may be pushed to the version branches and *master* directly.
+*   "Simple" and "trivial" are not further defined; use your best judgement.
+    We'll revisit this if and when it becomes necessary.