On 2014-02-12 09:51, Jesse Noller wrote:
On Feb 12, 2014, at 8:30 AM, Julie Pichon <jpic...@redhat.com> wrote:

Hi folks,

Stefano's post on how to make contributions to OpenStack easier [1]
finally stirred me into writing about something that vkmc and myself
have been doing on the side for a few months to help new contributors
to get involved.

Some of you may be aware of OpenHatch [2], a non-profit dedicated to
helping newcomers get started in open-source. About 6 months ago we
created a project page for Horizon [3], filled in a few high level
details, set ourselves up as mentors. Since then people have been
expressing interest in the project and a number of them got a patch
submitted and approved, a couple are sticking around (often helping out
with bug triaging, as confirming new bugs is one of the few tasks one
can help out with when only having limited time).

I can definitely sympathise with the comment in Stefano's article that
there are not enough easy tasks / simple issues for newcomers. There's
a lot to learn already when you're starting out (git, gerrit, python,
devstack, ...) and simple bugs are so hard to find - something that
will take a few minutes to an existing contributor will take much
longer for someone who's still figuring out where to get the code
from. Unfortunately it's not uncommon for existing contributors to take
on tasks marked as "low-hanging-fruit" because it's only 5 minutes (I
can understand this coming up to an RC but otherwise low-hanging-fruits
are often low priority nits that could wait a little bit longer). In
Horizon the low-hanging-fruits definitely get snatched up quickly and I
try to keep a list of typos or other low impact, trivial bugs that
would make good first tasks for people reaching out via OpenHatch.

OpenHatch doesn't spam, you get one email a week if one or more people
indicated they want to help. The initial effort is not time-consuming,
following OpenHatch's advice [4] you can refine a nice "initial
contact" email that helps you get people started and understand what
they are interested in quickly. I don't find the time commitment to be
too much so far, and it's incredibly gratifying to see someone
submitting their first patch after you answered a couple of questions
or helped resolve a hairy git issue. I'm happy to chat about it more,
if you're curious or have any questions.

In any case if you'd like to attract more contributors to your project,
and/or help newcomers get started in open-source, consider adding your
project to OpenHatch too!

Cheers,

Julie


+10

There’s been quite a bit of talk about this - but not necessarily on
the dev list. I think openhatch is great - mentorship programs in
general go a *long* way to help raise up and gain new people. Core
Python has had this issue for awhile, and many other large OSS
projects continue to suffer from it (“barrier to entry too high”).

Some random thoughts:

I’d like to see something like Solum’s Contributing page:

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Solum/Contributing

Expanded a little and potentially be the recommended “intro to
contribution” guide -
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/How_To_Contribute is good, but a more
accessible version goes a long way. You want to show them how easy /
fast it is, not all of the options at once.

So, glancing over the Solum page, I don't see anything specific to Solum in there besides a few paths in examples. It's basically a condensed version of https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/GerritWorkflow sans a lot of the detail. This might be a good thing to add as a QuickStart section on that wiki page (which is linked from the how to contribute page, although maybe not as prominently as it should be). But, a lot of that detail is needed before a change is going to be accepted anyway. I'm not sure giving a new contributor just the bare minimum is actually doing them any favors. Without letting them know things like how to format a commit message and configure their ssh keys on Gerrit, they aren't going to be able to get a change accepted anyway and IMHO they're likely to just give up anyway (and possibly waste some reviewer time in the process).

That said, the GerritWorkflow page definitely needs some updates and maybe a little condensing of its own. For example, do we really need distro-specific instructions for installing git-review? How about just "Install pip through your distro's package management tool of choice and then run pip install git-review"? I would hope anyone planning to contribute to OpenStack is capable of following that.

I guess my main point is that our contributing docs could use work, but there's also that "as simple as possible, but no simpler" thing to consider. And I certainly don't like that we seem to be duplicating effort on this front.

/2 cents

-Ben

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