Open Stack

On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 7:53 AM, Sean Dague <sean at dague.net> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
Yep, it's not just docs, wiki pages, well-triaged bugs, badges, but it's
mostly people. We need mentors and to treat them like gold! (We do.)

Julie Pichon is a great mentor, mentors with the Outreach Program for
Women, and is using Open Hatch for this contributor recruiting, onboarding,
and retaining. [1]

I'd encourage finding ways like this rather than building a badge system.
Not that I'd stop you, but I just don't know if a badges.openstack.org is
the goal when we can repurpose another site.

And when what we really need is mentors.

Love that we're all noodling on this.
Anne

1 http://openhatch.org/projects/OpenStack%20dashboard%20(Horizon)


> 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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