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

Doug Hellmann doug at doughellmann.com
Thu Feb 7 20:32:26 UTC 2019


Kendall Nelson <kennelson11 at gmail.com> writes:

> On Thu, Feb 7, 2019 at 4:45 AM Doug Hellmann <doug at doughellmann.com> wrote:
>
>> Thierry Carrez <thierry at openstack.org> writes:
>>
>> > Doug Hellmann wrote:
>> >> [...]
>> >> 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. 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'm a bit skeptical of that approach.
>> >
>> > Proper peer mentoring takes a lot of time, so I expect there will be a
>> > limited number of "I'll spend significant time helping you if you help
>> > us" offers. I don't envision potential contributors to browse dozens of
>> > project-specific "on-boarding doc" to find them. I would rather
>> > consolidate those offers on a single page.
>> >
>> > So.. either some magic consolidation job that takes input from all of
>> > those project-specific repos to build a nice rendered list... Or just a
>> > wiki page ?
>> >
>> > --
>> > Thierry Carrez (ttx)
>> >
>>
>> A wiki page would be nicely lightweight, so that approach makes some
>> sense. Maybe if the only maintenance is to review the page periodically,
>> we can convince one of the existing mentorship groups or the first
>> contact SIG to do that.
>>
>
> So I think that the First Contact SIG project liaison list kind of fits
> this. Its already maintained in a wiki and its already a list of people
> willing to be contacted for helping people get started. It probably just
> needs more attention and refreshing. When it was first set up we (the FC
> SIG) kind of went around begging for volunteers and then once we maxxed out
> on them, we said those projects without volunteers will have the role
> defaulted to the PTL unless they delegate (similar to how other liaison
> roles work).
>
> Long story short, I think we have the sort of mentoring things covered. And
> to back up an earlier email, project specific onboarding would be a good
> help too.

OK, that does sound pretty similar. I guess the piece that's missing is
a description of the sort of help the team is interested in receiving.

> In my mind I see the help most wanted list as being useful if we want to
> point people at specific projects that need more hands than others, but I
> think that the problem is that its hard to quanitfy/keep up to date and the
> TC was put in charge thinking that they had a better lay of the overall
> landscape? I think it could go away as documentation maintained by the TC.
> If we wanted to try to keep a like.. top 5 projects that need friends
> list... that could live in the FC SIG wiki as well I think.

When we started the current list we had a pretty small set of very high
priority gaps to fill. The list is growing, the priorities are changes,
and the previous list wasn't especially effective. All of which is
driving this desire to have a new list of some sort.

-- 
Doug



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