Open Stack

+1

Mentoring and devoted mentors and not demotivating new folks (but instead "growing" and fostering them) is IMHO 10x more important than a badge program. Badges seem nice and all but I think it's not the "biggest win for the buck".

Sent from my really tiny device...

> On Feb 13, 2014, at 6:06 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.
> 
> 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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