Open Stack

> Actually, these are quite related. Firstly, we need our existing
> contributors to be as efficient as they possibly can be to solve bugs.
> Changing a word to add in an additional character is not a valuable use
> of time. Secondly, we also need to be as welcoming as possible to every
> single person who's brave enough to get a patch up. At the moment we're
> alienating people.
> 
> The stats cannot be explained entirely by 'project growth' - see Matt
> K's recent email, for example. Why did the number of significant
> contributors go down? Why do I get messages like this one after coaxing
> a technical expert to contribute?
> 
> """
> writing docs for openstack: never again
> the whole thing is poop and i refuse to comment again on
> that review, and if someone emails me asking to convert one of
> its blogs to docs i will say no, suffer, people googling this important
> thing can come to our website instead
> """
> 
> I was lucky enough in that case to get the contributor through, but note
> that the flatlining of contributions, time-wise, correlates with a
> marked increase in "Conventions" discussions.
> 
> Changing 'colour' to 'color' might seem like a sensible thing to do, but
> in truth, it's stuff like that that's killing this project's ability to
> make things fun for volunteers.
> 
> So, work on reducing the behemoth of the style guide is very welcome.
> Every additional patchset is (at least) a few minutes we don't spend
> working on another bug, or losing us potential long-term contributors
> (and friends ^_^).

TBH in my limited experience, the biggest point of friction for new
contributors to docs would be more the docbook markup and toolchain,
as opposed to the trans-Atlantic spelling conventions.

The move towards simpler RST-based contributions should make a significant
dent in that on-ramp.

On the spelling conventions, I'm pretty much agnostic ... given that my
own output has long been an illogical mix of the Hiberno-English that my
fingers want to type and the US conventions that my spellcheckers seem
to prefer.

Cheers,
Eoghan