Note:
- KG
- Hello Everyone! We are going to talk about "Pain Points of Contribution in the Drupal Community".
Note:
- KG -bit.ly link for taking notes because more notes are better and after the session, Val and I will be preparing synthesis. We have posted slides with speaker notes online and bit.ly link for our session is. You can follow along the slides.
Note:
- KG I am from Washington D.C.
- Developer at Forum One
- Forum One is full service digital agency and does lot of work in Drupal for Government and non-profit organizations.
Note:
- Val
- Drupal developer, devops
- Founder, Wise Trout Drupal agency
- I am hirable!
Note:
- KG
- We are talking about pain points of contribution but lets talk first... What is a contribution?
- Contribution is organizing sprints,camps, meet ups, documentation, manual testing, design review, UX but here we are going to talk mainly about code contribution.
Note:
- KG
- How many people in the audience use IRC? As you know that Drupal lives on IRC and our day to day interaction occur in IRC related to issues in the issue queue . For a new contributor, it is hard to know that there is an IRC unless someone tell them there are IRC channels that they can join and ask question/have discussion.
drupal.org/irc Note:
- KG
- Concern for many of the user is - How do I connect to IRC, what channels should I be in? drupal.org/irc has list of IRC channels and this information is not available on drupal.org homepage.
- supposed way to IRC channel for a new person: search for 'start contributing', go to core mentoring page - go to IRC page
Note: -KG
- There is no indication of "this user is typing" so there are 3 people talking together and for example I am asking with someone else. All this get very confusing.
Note:
- KG
- There is no scroll back or history in IRC so if there was an interesting conversation and if we aren't there then we don't know about it not that we want to know but sometimes we do.
Note:
- KG
- What is a bouncer? Bouncer is a piece of software running on remote servers. Advantage of bouncer - you are always connected on IRC.
- Setting up bouncer costs money and it requires technical steps to set it up. Although it's easier later once you have set it up but initially it takes time and money.
Evaluate whether to replace drupal IRC channels with another communication medium Note:
- KG
- Need an easier way to communicate? In this issue community is exploring options to use some other chat app instead of IRC. Waartaa (OSS), Slack, Hipchat are some of the options being discussed in this issue.
Note:
- Val
- alternative to IRC - core updates via email, also posted on drupal.org already have Drupal core updates (a.k.a. "This Week in Drupal Core") is a weekly-to-monthly update on all the cool happenings in Drupal 8!
Allow crediting reviewers (and other non-coders) as first-class contributors Note:
- Val
- In this issue, we are talking about categorizing comment as review types Research - how things are done in Drupal, why it is broken and how other projects accomplish something. Proposal - If someone propose a idea or a specific architectural change Patch - provide a solution or patch Reviewers - Provide valuable reviews to the issue
Note:
- KG
- How do we give credits to reviewers reviewing docs? Use my example - I was reviewing doc issue for one of the safemarkup issue and I said I reviewed the doc and talked to contributor(who wrote the patch) in-person about making some changes, changes were made, issue was marked RTBC (if you don't know what is RTBC then it is Reviewed and tested by the community) and I didn't get commit credit. Why? Because I didn't say...yes, this line in this patch applies for this function or method and it does exactly what it is supposed to do so even I read the entire method and looked at the doc but failed to write that in the comment and I ended up getting no credit after spending 2 hour on that issue. SO in short provide a thorough feedback and not just that this works for me or I applied the patch and it worked fine. For any kind of review and not just the doc review..write the the review thoroughly because who doesn't like commit credit.
make profiles better [Meta] New design for User Profiles Note:
- KG
- How many people think that their user profile page on Drupal.org is important and they have added it to their resume? There has been some improvements made to user profile pages on Drupal.org for example - now it shows commit mention on number of issues that has been marked fixed during the last 3 month. I think its a huge improvement because we do recognize the value of having a nicer user profile pages with valuable information on D.O
Note:
- Val
- Contributors can add mentors at the end of the sprint so whoever is planning on attending sprints on Friday, please add mentors to your profile page so they can get credit and not just necessarily in-person mentoring but IRC mentoring as well. Mentoring isn't easy and mentors could work on the issues if they want to but they spend time with participants and help them work on issues.
Note:
- KG
- What can we do to encourage companies to contribute their developer time to core? Beside drupalcores.com/companies we don't really have any place to recognize core contribution. There is an option to check company name if contributor is working on issue and I think there is a plan in the pipeline to display name of the companies somewhere on drupal.org.Companies like to sponsor DrupalCon, camps etc because they get the exposure. How long it took us to raise D8 Accelerate fund? D8 Accelerate is to help release Drupal 8 by funding core developers to work on critical issues. There is a session on this - Paid contribution - Past, Present, and Future on Thursday at 1 pm. We encourage you to come and participate.
Note:
- Val What about contributors? All of us have responsibilities and have limited time but we do want to work on core so time is a big factor for most of the contributors. Also, money is another factor. Most of us have full-time jobs and responsibilities. We would like to help writing patch, review etc so how can we find time and money to support and contribute back to the community. There is a BoF on increasing contribution in OSS on Thursday at 11:45 AM
##Other OSS projects
photo credit: xjm Note:
- As I was talking in the previous slide...you can see long tail of graph. We have lots of contributor with 1 to 5 commit mention but we need to encourage them to become repeated contributors. This graph is little old because we do have 3150 core contributors.
- More reviewers
- Documentation
- Workflow
- Communication
- Motivation Note:
- Val We talked about pain points and here are some of our suggestions to resolve some of the pain points which were raised during DrupalCon LA discussion Get more reviewers Need more documentation, video, audio, walking people through issues Drupal workflow is very unique and it doesn't apply to other OSS projects. Make sure that communications that happen in IRC are summarized and documented on issues KG Motivation - Find motivation to work on issues. We don't to have the experience where there are 100's of comments and issue go nowhere. We need more reviewers so the issue can move forward. Time - Have some time available to work on core so all of us can have time to do stuff outside Drupal and still enjoy working on core. I don't know if there is any solution for this.