Open Stack

On 02/13/2014 05:37 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> Sandy Walsh wrote:
>> The informal OpenStack motto is "automate everything", so perhaps we should consider some form of gamification [1] to help us? Can we offer badges, quests and challenges to new users to lead them on the way to being strong contributors?
>>
>> "Fixed your first bug" badge
>> "Updated the docs" badge
>> "Got your blueprint approved" badge
>> "Triaged a bug" badge
>> "Reviewed a branch" badge
>> "Contributed to 3 OpenStack projects" badge
>> "Fixed a Cells bug" badge
>> "Constructive in IRC" badge
>> "Freed the gate" badge
>> "Reverted branch from a core" badge
>> etc. 
> 
> I think that works if you only keep the ones you can automate.
> "Constructive in IRC" for example sounds a bit subjective to me, and you
> don't want to issue those badges one-by-one manually.
> 
> Second thing, you don't want the game to start polluting your bug
> status, i.e. people randomly setting bugs to "triaged" to earn the
> "Triaged a bug" badge. So the badges we keep should be provably useful ;)
> 
> A few other suggestions:
> "Found a valid security issue" (to encourage security reports)
> "Fixed a bug submitted by someone else" (to encourage attacking random bugs)
> "Removed code" (to encourage tech debt reduction)
> "Backported a fix to a stable branch" (to encourage backporting)
> "Fixed a bug that was tagged nobody-wants-to-fix-this-one" (to encourage
> people to attack critical / hard bugs)
> 
> We might need "protected" tags to automate this: tags that only some
> people could set to bugs/tasks to designate "gate-freeing" or
> "nobody-wants-to-fix-this-one" bugs that will give you badges if you fix
> them.
> 
> So overall it's a good idea, but it sounds a bit tricky to automate it
> properly to avoid bad side-effects.

Gamification is a cool idea, if someone were to implement it, I'd be +1.

Realistically, the biggest issue I see with on-boarding is mentoring
time. Especially with folks completely new to our structure, there is a
lot of confusing things going on. And OpenStack is a ton to absorb. I
get pinged a lot on IRC, answer when I can, and sometimes just have to
ignore things because there are only so many hours in the day.

I think Anita has been doing a great job with the Neutron CI onboarding
and new folks, and that's given me perspective on just how many
dedicated mentors we'd need to bring new folks on. With 400 new people
showing up each release, it's a lot of engagement time. It's also
investment in our future, as some of these folks will become solid
contributors and core reviewers.

So it seems like the only way we'd make real progress here is to get a
chunk of people to devote some dedicated time to mentoring in the next
cycle. Gamification might be most useful, but honestly I expect a "Start
Here" page with the consolidated list of low-hanging-fruit bugs, and a
Review Here page with all reviews for low hanging fruit bugs (so they
don't get lost by core review team) would be a great start.

The delays on reviews for relatively trivial fixes I think is something
that is probably more demotivating to new folks than the lack of badges.
So some ability to keep on top of that I think would be really great.

	-Sean

-- 
Sean Dague
Samsung Research America
sean at dague.net / sean.dague at samsung.com
http://dague.net

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