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Drawing new contributors with simple tasks
Robert Varga
Hello everyone,
this is yet another wall of text from me. TL;DR is: we want to give
visibility of easy tasks so that even causal ODL users see where they
can contribute.
If that interests you, please read on. If not and you'd like more
relevant content from me, please unicast :)
We are faced with a dire lack of contributions, that is fact. We want to
attract new contributors as much as possible.
Another fact is that we are being used in production environments, which
sets the bar for contribution quality quite high.
This leads to competing requirements, where people willing to enter the
community with a fix will be faced with dire requirements -- just
because of the sensitive nature of the area they are touching.
We also lack the community resources to support on-boarding newcomers,
most highlighted by our inability to grow the community via internships.
Being the top contributor (by more than a fair margin) who ends up doing
all sorts of menial tasks, I think we need to start communicating the
need, and receiving help with, a number of low-priority but
nice-to-have-fixed issues.
One way of doing that is defining, labeling and publishing issues which
we (the ODL community) know to be (relatively) easy to do, but are
simply not of priority at a particular point in time.
For the definition part, I can say that filing a descriptive JIRA issue
takes 5-10 minutes, where the effort required to solving it takes 4-16
hours.
For the labeling part, I took the liberty of defining a new label,
'quickwin', in JIRA. There a whooping one issue in
https://jira.opendaylight.org/issues/?jql=labels%20%3D%20quickwin
What I struggle with is the question of communication -- and hence this
wall of text (again, sorry, but heck there's so much context first!).
Can we perhaps create a documentation page for this?
My thinking is that it should be the first item under
https://docs.opendaylight.org/en/latest/#opendaylight-contributor-guides
and would serve as the bare-bones, minimum-requirements, step-by-step
HOW-TO of getting involved.
What do you think?
Regards,
Robert
this is yet another wall of text from me. TL;DR is: we want to give
visibility of easy tasks so that even causal ODL users see where they
can contribute.
If that interests you, please read on. If not and you'd like more
relevant content from me, please unicast :)
We are faced with a dire lack of contributions, that is fact. We want to
attract new contributors as much as possible.
Another fact is that we are being used in production environments, which
sets the bar for contribution quality quite high.
This leads to competing requirements, where people willing to enter the
community with a fix will be faced with dire requirements -- just
because of the sensitive nature of the area they are touching.
We also lack the community resources to support on-boarding newcomers,
most highlighted by our inability to grow the community via internships.
Being the top contributor (by more than a fair margin) who ends up doing
all sorts of menial tasks, I think we need to start communicating the
need, and receiving help with, a number of low-priority but
nice-to-have-fixed issues.
One way of doing that is defining, labeling and publishing issues which
we (the ODL community) know to be (relatively) easy to do, but are
simply not of priority at a particular point in time.
For the definition part, I can say that filing a descriptive JIRA issue
takes 5-10 minutes, where the effort required to solving it takes 4-16
hours.
For the labeling part, I took the liberty of defining a new label,
'quickwin', in JIRA. There a whooping one issue in
https://jira.opendaylight.org/issues/?jql=labels%20%3D%20quickwin
What I struggle with is the question of communication -- and hence this
wall of text (again, sorry, but heck there's so much context first!).
Can we perhaps create a documentation page for this?
My thinking is that it should be the first item under
https://docs.opendaylight.org/en/latest/#opendaylight-contributor-guides
and would serve as the bare-bones, minimum-requirements, step-by-step
HOW-TO of getting involved.
What do you think?
Regards,
Robert