Open Stack

Colleen Murphy wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 21, 2017 at 9:00 AM, Diana Clarke
> <diana.joan.clarke at gmail.com <mailto:diana.joan.clarke at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Congrats on being elected to the TC, Colleen!
> 
>     You mentioned earlier in this thread that, "a major problem in the
>     tech world is not just attracting underrepresented contributors, but
>     retaining them".
> 
>     I'm curious if the TC has considered polling the people that have left
>     OpenStack for their experiences on this front.
> 
>     Something along the lines of:
> 
>         "I see you contributed 20 patches in the last cycle, but haven't
>     contributed recently, why did you stop contributing?".
> 
>     Given the recent layoffs, I suspect many of the responses will be
>     predicable, but you might find some worthwhile nuggets there
>     nonetheless.
> 
> I'm not aware of such an initiative so far but I do think it would be
> useful, and perhaps something we can partner with the foundation on.

Kind of parallel to the polling idea:

John Dickinson has some interesting scripts that he runs to detect
deviation from a past contribution pattern (like someone who used to
contribute a few patches per cycle but did not contribute anything over
the past cycle, or someone who used to contribute a handful of patches
per month who did not send a single patch over the past month). Once
oddities in the contribution pattern are detected, he would contact the
person to ask if anything happened or changed that made them stop
contributing.

John would probably describe it better than I did. I like that it's not
just quantitative but more around deviation from an established
contribution pattern, which lets him spot issues earlier.

Note that this sort of analysis works well when combined with personal
outreach, which works better at project team level... If done at
OpenStack level you would likely have more difficulty making it feel
personal (if I end up reaching out to a Tacker dev that stopped
contributing, it won't be as effective as if the Tacker PTL did the
outreach). One thing we could do would be to productize those tools and
make them available to a wider number of people.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)