[tc] The future of the "Help most needed" list

Kendall Nelson kennelson11 at gmail.com
Thu Feb 7 19:45:21 UTC 2019


On Mon, Feb 4, 2019 at 9:26 AM Doug Hellmann <doug at doughellmann.com> wrote:

> Jeremy Stanley <fungi at yuggoth.org> writes:
>
> > On 2019-02-04 17:31:46 +0900 (+0900), Ghanshyam Mann wrote:
> > [...]
> >> If I recall it correctly from  Board+TC meeting, TC is looking for
> >> a new home for this list ? Or we continue to maintain this in TC
> >> itself which should not be much effort I feel.
> > [...]
> >
> > It seems like you might be referring to the in-person TC meeting we
> > held on the Sunday prior to the Stein PTG in Denver (Alan from the
> > OSF BoD was also present). Doug's recap can be found in the old
> > openstack-dev archive here:
> >
> >
> http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2018-September/134744.html
> >
> > Quoting Doug, "...it wasn't clear that the TC was the best group to
> > manage a list of 'roles' or other more detailed information. We
> > discussed placing that information into team documentation or
> > hosting it somewhere outside of the governance repository where more
> > people could contribute." (If memory serves, this was in response to
> > earlier OSF BoD suggestions that retooling the Help Wanted list to
> > be a set of business-case-focused job descriptions might garner more
> > uptake from the organizations they represent.)
> > --
> > Jeremy Stanley
>
> Right, the feedback was basically that we might have more luck
> convincing companies to provide resources if we were more specific about
> how they would be used by describing the work in more detail. When we
> started thinking about how that change might be implemented, it seemed
> like managing the information a well-defined job in its own right, and
> our usual pattern is to establish a group of people interested in doing
> something and delegating responsibility to them. When we talked about it
> in the TC meeting in Denver we did not have any TC members volunteer to
> drive the implementation to the next step by starting to recruit a team.
>
> During the Train series goal discussion in Berlin we talked about having
> a goal of ensuring that each team had documentation for bringing new
> contributors onto the team.


This was something I thought the docs team was working on pushing with all
of the individual projects, but I am happy to help if they need extra
hands. I think this is suuuuuper important. Each Upstream Institute we
teach all the general info we can, but we always mention that there are
project specific ways of handling things and project specific processes. If
we want to lower the barrier for new contributors, good per project
documentation is vital.


> Offering specific mentoring resources seems
> to fit nicely with that goal, and doing it in each team's repository in
> a consistent way would let us build a central page on docs.openstack.org
> to link to all of the team contributor docs, like we link to the user
> and installation documentation, without requiring us to find a separate
> group of people to manage the information across the entire community.


I think maintaining the project liaison list[1] that the First Contact SIG
has kind of does this? Between that list and the mentoring cohort program
that lives under the D&I WG, I think we have things covered. Its more a
matter of publicizing those than starting something new I think?


>
> So, maybe the next step is to convince someone to champion a goal of
> improving our contributor documentation, and to have them describe what
> the documentation should include, covering the usual topics like how to
> actually submit patches as well as suggestions for how to describe areas
> where help is needed in a project and offers to mentor contributors.

Does anyone want to volunteer to serve as the goal champion for that?
>
>
I can probably draft a rough outline of places where I see projects diverge
and make a template, but where should we have that live?

/me imagines a template similar to the infra spec template


> --
> Doug
>
>
 [1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/First_Contact_SIG#Project_Liaisons
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