Open Stack

On Tue, Oct 24, 2017 at 1:47 PM, Thierry Carrez <thierry at openstack.org>
wrote:

> 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.
>
It's great to hear that something like this already exists.

>
> 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).

That's a really good point, but I would counter that in certain
circumstances this might not result in the most honest answers, if for
example the reason for leaving was due to personal problems with the PTL or
someone in the team leadership.

Even with a personalized outreach approach, I think it's important that the
data be recorded centrally so it can be analyzed across the various teams
for trends.

> One thing we could do would be to productize those tools and
> make them available to a wider number of people.
>
++

>
> --
> Thierry Carrez (ttx)
>
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