Hello everyone, Together with Elad, Kaxil, and the Dosu team [1], we’ve been looking into employing AI / Natural Language processing to help us triage issues for Apache Airflow. We do not want to go “all-in” into getting a chatbot to respond to all our issues because we believe this is not how the community is being built. We looked at various ways we can start exploring the capabilities of the new ML/AI/Natural Language processing available.
We worked with the Dosu team. They are approved by the Apache Software Foundation infrastructure as Github integration and few ASF projects already use it (including our friends at Superset) - they have a fantastic offer to provide free service for open-source projects like Airflow. Together we evaluated what we can start with and initially we have a proposal to use auto-labeling of issues created in the Airflow repository. We have a number of rules that are established for the triage team [2] but those rules are mundane and difficult to follow, and generally a lot of our issues are either not classified or badly classified, and currently we cannot rely on the classification. What we want to start with is to re-classify our issues and apply the labels retro-actively for all past issues as well as start applying them automatically for new issues. The risk of doing it is low, and it will allow us to explore integration and follow up with more elaborated integration. We have some options such as getting automated proposals for answers for similar questions, as well as “chat-bot generated/maintainer approved” answers - but we definitely do not want to have bots starting to answer automatically on PRs and issues. We think that this will allow us to explore more ways how we can make maintainers and triagers time more efficient - and help us while we are focusing also on Airflow 3 development soon. The Dosu founder - Devin, will send some more information soon and is available for questions here and in the #triage-team channel on Slack. Unless we hear some complaints, we will apply labelling changes in a few days, I think this stage is not really controversial, and we will run a LAZY CONSENSUS in a few days. J. E. K. (and the Dosu team). [1] https://dosu.dev/ [2] https://github.com/apache/airflow/blob/main/ISSUE_TRIAGE_PROCESS.rst#labels
