Open Stack

On 19/11/18 8:31 AM, Jay Pipes wrote:
> 
>> Getting users involved in the project
>> =====================================
>> - Disconnect between SIGs/WGs and project teams
>> - Too steep a first step to get involved by subscribing to ML
>> - People confused about how to participate
> 
> Seriously? If subscribing to a mailing list is seen as too much of a 
> burden for users to provide feedback, I'm wondering what the point is of 
> having an open source community at all.

The gist of the session was that the steps we have traditionally 
recommended were appropriate for somebody who has just been hired to 
work (substantially) full-time on upstream OpenStack, which at one time 
was not only common but arguably the best thing for us to concentrate on 
optimising. However, the same is not necessarily true for other types of 
contributors.

For example, if someone is an operator of OpenStack with no time carved 
out to contribute, we still want them to push any patches they have 
upstream where possible, and some of those folks may even go on from 
there to become long-term contributors. (Ditto for end-users and bug 
reports.) For those folks, "sign up for ~17k p/a emails straight to your 
inbox and then maybe we'll talk" isn't the most helpful first step.


FWIW, my input to the session was essentially this:

* It isn't actually a great mystery how you retain and grow casual 
contributors: you make sure they get immediate, friendly, actionable, 
but most importantly immediate feedback any time they interact with the 
rest of the community. I believe that all of us understand this on some 
level.
* If this were our top priority it would be completely feasible (though 
something else would certainly be sacrificed).
* Revealed preferences suggest that it isn't, which is why we are 
discussing everything but that.

cheers,
Zane.