Open Stack

On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 8:20 AM, Nicolas Barcet <nicolas at barcet.com> wrote:

> Dear TC members,
>
> Our companies are actively encouraging our respective customers to have
> the patches they mission us to make be contributed back upstream.  In order
> to encourage this behavior from them and others, it would be nice that if
> could gain some visibility as "sponsors" of the patches in the same way we
> get visibility as "authors" of the patches today.
>

I think this statement is a decent description of the goal, my paraphrasing
would be "reward upstream through recognition." But there has to be a
better way than commit messages. We should also serve users better by
perhaps indicating that a company they trust and partner with is ensuring
OpenStack is all they, the users, want it to be. I agree the commit message
is sacred but besides, users shouldn't have to sift through Gerrit patches.

Also realize that there's research [1] about motivations for contributing
to community work:
reciprocity (I help because others help me)
recognition
efficiency (saves time)
attachment or commitment to a group

What about something with attribution in the docs for the feature? Can we
play around with that a while? Attribution is going to have to be
incorporated better into the docs for the CC By licensing anyway. Any
thoughts on docs as placement for "This feature brought to you by <insert
rewarded upstreamer here>" We need to play with the words more. Sponsored
by brings up ickies for me, sounds like it turns others off too. Let's be
careful with wording and placement both.

Thanks,
Anne

1.
http://www.connectedaction.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/2001-peter-kollock-economies-of-online-cooperation.htm


>
> The goal here is not to provide yet another way to count affiliations of
> direct contributors, nor is it a way to introduce sales pitches in contrib.
>  The only acceptable and appropriate use of the proposal we are making is
> to signal when a patch made by a contributor for another comany than the
> one he is currently employed by.
>
> For example if I work for a company A and write a patch as part of an
> engagement with company B, I would signal that Company B is the sponsor of
> my patch this way, not Company A.  Company B would under current
> circumstances not get any credit for their indirect contribution to our
> code base, while I think it is our intent to encourage them to contribute,
> even indirectly.
>
> To enable this, we are proposing that the commit text of a patch may
> include a
>    sponsored-by: <sponsorname>
> line which could be used by various tools to report on these commits.
>  Sponsored-by should not be used to report on the name of the company the
> contributor is already affiliated to.
>
> We would appreciate to see your comments on the subject and eventually get
> your approval for it's use.
>
> Boris Rensky, Tristan Goode, Nick Barcet
>
> _______________________________________________
> OpenStack-dev mailing list
> OpenStack-dev at lists.openstack.org
> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
>
>


-- 
Anne Gentle
annegentle at justwriteclick.com
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