I like Roman's idea of filling out the maturity model template, I too think that might help get a holistic view . I can volunteer to do it as a sentry community member if needed.
And let me take a stab at which of these I think we did for growing the community. On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 10:22 AM, Marvin Humphrey <mar...@rectangular.com> wrote: > On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 9:06 AM, Patrick Hunt <ph...@apache.org> wrote: > > > In my experience "growing the community" is hard. It's very easy to say, > > hard to do. > > Agreed -- and that why so many podlings put so much effort into it over the > course of incubation and find it a challenging hurdle to overcome. When a > project enters incubation, its core developers should expect that they are > going to do a lot less coding and a lot more recruitment and community > management for a long while. > > * Raising awareness of the product through talks, articles, etc. > Sentry community members have given talks at major conferences like ApacheCon, Hadoop World and so on. We also hosted Sentry Meetups around the globe. One of my favorites is in India, where there were around 100 participants. We also wrote a few blog posts to make it easy to digest information on latest features. And we also continuously improve on our website and wiki pages. * Writing up "how to contribute" documents. > We have an excellent "how to contribute" page, which we continuously improve on. A lot of new comers have used the doc to make their first Apache contribution, which I am very proud of, as I believe the first commit is the major step in the journey. I know of at least few contributors who have used the doc and also have contributed back to the doc with what they saw as gaps. * Teeing up easy starter issues. > We do have a newbie label that we use to mark easy to fix jiras. I agree that it is hard to keep up with tagging all relevant jiras, but we try to do our best. And try to revisit when ever there is a new contributor trying to look for jiras to pick up. > * Responding to any contributions quickly and thoroughly. > This is an ongoing thing and I think Sentry community has been good here. Although, I think we should continually strive to decrease the waiting time. > * Involving the community in development discussions. > >From what I see, depending on how much clarity we have on a new idea: Folks either prefer to discuss on dev list or open a jira and have discussion on the jira. The discussion continues through review board until the patch is committed (even after in fact). * Engaging contributors and collaborating with them to develop *their* > ideas > through code review, constructive feedback, freewheeling design > discussions, being flexible about integrating new ideas, and so on. > Ideas have been proposed by various developers in the past and have went through a very healthy cycle of code reviews, feedbacks, refactoring, testing and committing. * Ensuring that the codebase is easy to approach (builds easily, well > commented, etc.) > > Yes. I would not say Sentry is the most well commented project on earth and but we do have contributors who care about project quality and maintainability and we strive to always improve on that front. There's a lot of stuff we can do to grow communities, and though it's > always a > lot of work, the techniques are reasonably well understood around Apache by > now. How much of that has Sentry done? And where in the "open source > funnel" has there been the greatest narrowing? > > 1. People hear about the product. > 2. People download, install, and try out the product. > 3. People keep using the product, becoming users. > 4. Users offer up their first patches, becoming contributors. > 5. Contributors get invited to become committers. > 6. Committers get invited to become (P)PMC members. > > While it might be "artificial" to consider promoting three committers who > may > or may not be ready, it's reasonable to ask, how much have the senior > members > of the Sentry community invested in developing those three contributors, > and > have there been other contributors who have been lost along the way? > > But getting three new committers is actually pretty great! So how about > the > Sentry community focuses in on those three and asks, if we believe they are > not yet ready, what can we do to facilitate their development and get them > to > the point where they *are* ready? Because if one or more becomes a PPMC > member that the rest of the community has full confidence in, the "grow the > community" critieria will be satisfied in both letter and spirit. > > We actually have not 3 but 7 new committers! And IMO, we have 3 candidates for PPMC, who for various reasons I thought (IMO) were not ready a few months back but now I believe they are. I would be more than happy to start the discussion on private and give out details there. One question on discussing candidature of a person for PPMC on private: I know that private is only for PPMC, but I believe the new elected PPMC can always get the digest for older messages (or not?). If that is the case wouldn't it defeat the purpose of having these discussions on private? Hope this helps, > > Marvin Humphrey > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org > > -- Sravya Tirukkovalur
