Hi,

Thanks for bringing this important topic for discussion Benjamin. I think
it would help to enumerate what issues we face to attract new contributors
currently and then try to act on those.

1. Committers have little bandwidth to review low-impact issues (ie. Low
Hanging Fruit (LHF)), which are generally the entry-point for new
contributors. Lack of feedback on these initial contributions discourage
new contributions, creating a barrier for new contributors to join the
community (this point was raised by Stefan on this thread[1]).

2. Lack of consistency when labeling tickets as LHF. Some tickets are easy
but not tagged as LHF, some tickets are tagged as LHF but are not easy
enough for new contributors.

3. Lack of consistency when filling JIRA tickets. Some tickets have a clear
scope and definition, making it easier for new contributors to self serve
and figure out what needs to be done, while others have bad descriptions or
ill-defined scopes making it hard for beginners to work on these tickets.

4. Out of date or invalid JIRA tickets, making it harder for beginners to
figure out if a given ticket is valid or not to work on.

In order to improve each of these items I propose the following action
items:

1. This is the most important and at the same time the hardest issue to
solve because committers in fact have limited bandwidth and are generally
working on larger impact items. Nevertheless we must understand the
importance of attracting new contributors to the project in order to
increase the contributor pool and diversity. So I think committers and
organizations must spare some of their bandwidth to ensure tickets from new
contributors are reviewed and given feedback in a timely manner. I also
think that we could set up a slack bot to alert #cassandra-dev periodically
when there are patch available tickets without reviewers to bring attention
to those.

2. I think we need to define clear guidelines of what is a low hanging
fruit ticket and document it, since the interpretation can vary wildly
depending on who files the ticket. I also think we need to add one
additional complexity type "Easy" in between "LHF" and "Normal" tickets, to
avoid people tagging easy tickets as LHF tickets, since "LHF" tickets are
easy ticket for new contributors, while "Easy" tickets would be easy
tickets for existing contributors.

3. I think we need better guidelines and documentation on how to file
tickets with well defined descriptions and scope (or explicitly mention
when scope is unclear), to ensure we have better consistency between
different ticket definitions.

4. For this I think the workflow proposed on the JIRA Ticket Hygiene thread
[1] will be helpful.

This list is non-exhaustive so feel free to add more points as well as
discuss these points I raised.

Regards,

Paulo

[1] - https://www.mail-archive.com/dev@cassandra.apache.org/msg16384.html

Em sex., 23 de abr. de 2021 às 11:50, Benjamin Lerer <ble...@apache.org>
escreveu:

>  Hi Everybody,The Apache Cassandra project always had some issues to
> attract and retain new contributors. I think it would be great to change
> this.According to the "How to Attract New Contributors" blog post (
> https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/how-attract-new-contributors) having a good
> onboarding process is a critical part. How to contribute should be obvious
> and contributing should be as easy as possible for all the different types
> of contributions: code, documentation, web-site or help with our CI
> infrastructure.I would love to hear about your ideas on how we can improve
> things.If you are new in the community, do not hesitate to share your
> experience and your suggestions on what we can do to make it easier for you
> to contribute.
>

Reply via email to