Open Stack

Excerpts from Chris Dent's message of 2018-04-23 17:50:31 +0100:
> On Mon, 23 Apr 2018, Tim Bell wrote:
> 
> > One of the challenges in the academic sector is the time from
> > lightbulb moment to code commit. Many of the academic resource
> > opportunities are short term (e.g. PhDs, student projects,
> > government funded projects) and there is a latency in current
> > system to onboard, get the appropriate recognition in the
> > community (such as by reviewing other changes) and then get the
> > code committed.  This is a particular problem for the larger
> > projects where the patch is not in one of the project goal areas
> > for that release.
> 
> This. Many times over this.
> 
> The latency that a casual contributor may experience when
> interacting with one of the larger OpenStack projects is
> discouraging and a significant impedance mismatch for the
> contributor.
> 
> One thing that might help is what I implied in one of my responses
> elsewhere in Doug's collection of questions: Professional OpenStack
> developers could be oriented towards enabling and attending to
> casual contributors more than addressing feature development. This
> is a large shift in how OpenStack is done, but makes sense in a
> world where we are trying to maintain an existing and fairly mature
> thing: We need maintainers.

I would like for us to collect some more data about what efforts
teams are making with encouraging new contributors, and what seems
to be working or not. In the past we've done pretty well at finding
new techniques by experimenting within one team and then adapting
the results to scale them out to other teams.

Does anyone have any examples of things that we ought to be trying more
of?

Doug