On 1/13/19 7:13 AM, Sharan Foga wrote:
Hi All
A while ago I mentioned that I was doing a paper based on the ASF and the
Apache Way culture
https://s.apache.org/XLXi
Well it is done and for those of you not following the Kibble mailing list
(since I used Kibble as my main research tool :-), here is a link to my paper
on the Kibble wiki
https://s.apache.org/VTAy
It’s over 30 pages long so for those of you who don’t want to read that many
pages, I’ve also created a wiki page without all the nice Kibble graphs :-)
that summarises the main points from the paper here.
https://s.apache.org/ESEh
Huge thanks to Shane for agreeing to be one of my supervisors, and a shout out
goes out to the Kibble community for creating a tool that provides such a
variety of interesting and important community related information.
Please feel to take a look and respond with with any comments or feedback.
Hi Sharan,
Thanks so much for sharing. I think you did a very nice job
presenting the culture and you are asking the right basic question.
Before getting into the analysis portion, I have one comment on the
culture description part that I think deserves mention. Under
"merit" you have "People contribute to the ASF as individuals" and
in a sense this fully captures our "diversity" requirement; but at
least as an assumption the idea that our projects are independent
(not controlled by external entities) should be called out somewhere.
Here are some things to think about relative to the analysis portion.
First, the pony factor is an interesting measure, but It's a stretch
really to see it as indicative of cultural transmission. I know you
are not really claiming that and it may be a nicely correlated
measure; but without a deeper analysis of actual understanding /
"acculturation" among volunteers in communities with high PF values,
I am not sure what it means. It is quite possible, for example for
a fast-growing company to pay a lot of committers and efficiently
divide up work among them so the PF goes way up but the community is
effectively closed to outsiders. It's also possible that one or two
committers to make many trivial commits pushing that statistic
down. Again, on average, it is an interesting statistic; but all
that it measures is how commits are distributed. You are right that
high PF indicates growth in the committer base (or at least stable
dispersion of commits); but that's all that it indicates. There
are some historical examples where high PF was not correlated with
successful acculturation. I will mention only the dead one:
Jakarta. That project was wildly successful in attracting
contributors and commit was not that hard to get; but "we" were
pretty clueless :)
The text analysis is also interesting, but I am afraid that just
extracting key phrases and sentient analysis may not accurately
reflect cultural transmission / evolution. An interesting follow-up
might be to select some projects that appear to be in good shape in
terms of culture from your measures and others that appear not so
good and really dig into the lists, JIRAs, board reports, etc. to
see if the same picture emerges. In other words, integrate
qualitative analysis of the project communications (and contribution
history) to validate that your empirical results are valid and / or
to better train your textual analysis algorithms. You seem to be
headed in that direction in some of the suggestions for further
research.
Thanks again for sharing and for stimulating us thinking about how
our communities are growing. One final comment is that while the
basic ideas that you have at the beginning are not likely to change
quickly, we need to make sure that allow our culture itself to grow
and evolve. That's another reason to be careful about developing
empirical measures around how our communities embody the culture.
Phil
Thanks
Sharan
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