The tl;dr on this is that I'm opening a broad community discussion on how we can, collectively through improved communication, better bring together our established contributors with casual and prospective contributors who struggle to find successful patterns of contribution, so that we might all support each other in order to benefit OpenStack as a whole. Read on for details... OpenStack's TC has requested that foundation staff, when in conversation with representatives of member organizations, encourage participation in the project and collect feedback on any related challenges those organizations encounter in their attempts to do so. In order to better understand the feedback and brainstorm achievable recommendations for the broader community[*], Community Managers on the foundation staff started to work with a small focus group of established contributors with a solid understanding of what successful patterns of contribution look like. It also came to light that established contributors experience many of the same sorts of challenges, even more so if they don't have the luxury of focusing full-time upstream, and so success often comes down to knowing how to effectively navigate those challenges. The community's goal with this exercise is to improve everyone's experience, and your help is needed to do that! The most common themes reported by those struggling to contribute are not related to tooling or workflow confusion, but instead seem to come down to basic communication challenges. Ideas so far to address these gaps include: * Review bandwidth - Ensure contributors and companies understand the importance and benefits of code review - Incentivize and credit meaningful "+1" reviews more - Understand that the volume of changes and limited reviewer bandwidth often means proposals aren't reviewed quickly (or at all), and their proponents may need some additional tenacity and engagement with the team to get their work noticed - Utilize "review dashboards" as a way to find stale changes which have fallen through the cracks * Review strategy and etiquette - Be clear about the meaning of votes on changes, especially negative ones, and set explicit timelines for things like "procedural -2" or WIP blocks when their approval needs to be delayed - Focus on comments and requests that affect whether or not the change can be merged after the fixes are submitted, rather than requesting trivial adjustments to an unsuitable change which has more fundamental problems - Reciprocate with reviews of changes from new reviewers you see leaving insubstantial reviews, demonstrating to them what deeper and more meaningful reviewing looks like * Mentoring newcomers - Established contributors with sufficient bandwidth can help mentoring newcomers, potential core reviewers and new leaders - Mentoring can happen as part of internship programs as well as by helping newcomers determined to become active contributors; both ways should be embraced and utilized What challenges are you facing? And, how would you improve them? Two weeks from now, we'll have a forum session at the OpenInfra Summit Asia in Suwon[**] where our community can refine these possible approaches and integrate others, as well as bring attention to them and promote their application. I've also proposed a similar forum session for OpenInfra Days North America in Indianapolis a month after that, where we can hopefully continue this conversation. The goal for this multi-stage effort is to improve the contribution experience for established participants, casual contributors and newcomers alike. While it's easy to jump to blaming in these situations, it will be far more productive if we can focus on the challenges and experiences that we would each like to remove or improve for ourselves and others in our community. As we find ways together to improve our efficiency, we can reduce the load on all contributors and lower the barriers for people to join and participate. [*] https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/r.2205024e55689bccb82c20c960853cb5 [**] https://2024.openinfraasia.org/a/schedule#view=calendar&title=Bridging%20the%20Gap -- Jeremy Stanley