Open Stack

Excerpts from Thierry Carrez's message of 2017-10-24 13:47:32 +0200:
> 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.
> 

Yes, any tools that we can use to produce real data to inform an
outreach program would be useful.

Doug