Open Stack

On 24 Oct 2017, at 4:47, Thierry Carrez 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.

That's a pretty good summary.

>
> 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.

TBH I haven't used these tools that much for a while. Between an increased an increased personal reach-out ("Hey, what's going on?") and obvious stuff like companies pulling away from OpenStack contributions, there haven't been any surprises. Most of the active contributors have been pretty up-front about their ability (or lack thereof) to contribute.

>
> -- 
> Thierry Carrez (ttx)
>
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