On Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 10:06 AM, Doug Hellmann <d...@doughellmann.com> wrote: > [This is meant to be one of (I hope) several conversation-provoking > questions directed at prospective TC members to help the community > understand their positions before considering how to vote in the > ongoing election.] > > Over the last year we have seen some contraction in the number of > companies and individuals contributing to OpenStack. At the same > time we have started seeing contributions from other companies and > individuals. To some degree this contraction and shift in contributor > base is a natural outcome of changes in OpenStack itself along with > the rest of the technology industry, but as with any change it > raises questions about how and whether we can ensure a smooth > transition to a new steady state. > > What aspects of our policies or culture make contributing to OpenStack > more difficult than contributing to other open source projects? > > Which of those would you change, and how? > > Where else should we be looking for contributors?
I think that for the most part, the most vocal audience is the one that contributes the most is mostly very comfortable with the tools and processes that we have in place today. However, I think we may have become 'blind' to the viewpoint of new contributors and forgot some of our habits might be very difficult pain points for other users. ## Communication There is a significant amount of communication and work that happens over IRC. I'll admit, it's one of my most preferable ways of communicating. However, it's not something that is common for newer contributors to use. Our developer manual lists it before anything: https://docs.openstack.org/infra/manual/developers.html#irc-account There are a few other communities which are growing quickly and they're using alternative ways of communication. I personally prefer IRC, but maybe we should put our preferences aside and look at what's sustainable, because we have to be progressive and move quickly. Perhaps we should look into a OpenStack Slack community in combination with an IRC bridge? ## Tooling The majority of long time OpenStack contributors are very comfortable with the Gerrit workflow. They're also very comfortable with rebasing patches, pushing them, setting up dependencies, etc. The newer developer might have some Gerrit experience but more than likely, they might probably have more of a GitHub workflow experience and that's the easiest way that the can submit code. While my own preference is to use Gerrit, I think that perhaps looking into opening up a way for contributions via GitHub to be available could be an interesting option. Now, the technical side of me can imagine all the challenges, but again, we must keep things easy and approachable. If submitting a patch to the OpenStack community involves setting up an account in the Canonical "Ubuntu One" OpenID, creating a username in Gerrit afterwards, sign the CLA, which could get complicated depending on your organization, upload your keys, setup git-review before being able to push up a single patch (and then there's Launchpad for bugs and some projects are on Storyboard, etc) That's a lot of extra work that we're putting on new potential contributors. I don't mind it, but I think we have to collectively think about new potential contributors rather than our preferences. I'm giving a lot of ideas that I might not have technical solutions in place, but I think putting them out might bring up some other ways that we can come to a compromise and make it work to make contributing to OpenStack easy. > > Doug > > __________________________________________________________________________ > OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) > Unsubscribe: openstack-dev-requ...@lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe > http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev __________________________________________________________________________ OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) Unsubscribe: openstack-dev-requ...@lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev