Open Stack

Excerpts from Shamail Tahir's message of 2015-11-25 09:15:54 -0500:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Andrew Mitry recently shared a medium post[1] by Kent C. Dobbs which
> discusses how one open-source project is encouraging contributions by new
> open-source contributors through a combination of a special tag (which is
> associated with work that is needed but can only be completed by someone
> who is a first-time contributor) and helpful comments in the review phase
> to ensure the contribution(s) eventually get merged.
> 
> While reading the article, I immediately thought about our
> low-hanging-fruit bug tag which is used for a very similar purpose in "bug
> fixing" section of  the "how to contribute" page[2].  The low-hanging-fruit
> tag is used to identify items that are generally suitable for first-time or
> beginner contributors but, in reality, anyone can pick them up.
> 
> I wanted to propose a new tag (or even changing the, existing, low-hanging
> fruit tag) that would identify items that we are reserving for first-time
> OpenStack contributors (e.g. a patch-set for the item submitted by someone
> who is not a first time contributor would be rejected)... The same article
> that Andrew shared mentions using an "up-for-grabs" tag which also
> populates the items at up-for-grabs[3] (a site where people looking to
> start working on open-source projects see entry-level items from multiple
> projects).  If we move forward with an exclusive tag for first-timers then
> it would be nice if we could use the up-for-grabs tag so that OpenStack
> also shows up on the list too.  Please let me know if this change should be
> proposed elsewhere, the tags are maintained in launchpad and the wiki I
> found related to bug tags[4] didn't indicate a procedure for submitting a
> change proposal.

I like the idea of making bugs suitable for first-timers more
discoverable. I'm not sure we need to *reserve* any bugs for any class
of contributor. What benefit do you think that provides?

> 
> Tyler Britten also suggested maybe even having a pool of reviewers who
> could monitor items being worked on that fall in this "first-timer"
> category who could further help the new contributors by helpful review
> comments and answering questions if the contributors get stuck on some part
> of the process.  Could this be the same people who helped make the upstream
> training[5] successful?  I look forward to thoughts on this matter.

If we have volunteers willing to do this, that's great. It's not
obvious, but it is actually possible to query gerrit for reviews
from first-time contributors. A bot A watches for new patches leaves
a comment on any for which the submitter has not previously submitted
a patch. Querying for open reviews with comments from that bot is
straightforward once you know its gerrit id. For example, this URL
will show all open patches from first-time contributors submitted
to any repository:

https://review.openstack.org/#/q/reviewer:10068+is:open,n,z

Doug

> 
> [1] https://medium.com/@kentcdodds/first-timers-only-78281ea47455#.707dal290
> [2] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/How_To_Contribute#Bug_fixing
> <https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/How_To_Contribute#Bug_fixing>
> [3] http://up-for-grabs.net/
> [4] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Bug_Tags
> [5] http://docs.openstack.org/upstream-training/
>