Hi All, I thought I would add a couple of observations and suggestions as someone who has both personally made my first contributions to the project in the last few months and someone in a leadership role in an organisation (Instaclustr) that is feeling it’s way through increasing our contributions as an organisation.
Firstly - an observation on contribution experience and what I think is likely to make people want to contribute again: 1) The worst thing that can happen is for your contribution to be completely ignored. 2) The second worst thing is for it to be rejected without a good explanation (that you can learn from) or with hostility. 3) Having it rejected with a good reason is not a bad thing (you learn) 4) Having it accepted is, of course, the best! With this as a background I would suggest a couple of thing that help make sure (3) and (4) are always more common that (1) and (2) (good outcomes are probably more common than bad at the moment but we’ve experienced all four scenarios in the last few months): 1) I think some process of assigning a committer of a “sponsor” of a change (which would probably mean committers volunteering) before it commences would be useful. You can kind of do this at the moment by creating a JIRA and asking for comment but I think the process is a bit unclear and a bit intimidating for people starting off and it would be nice to know who was your primary reviewer for a piece of work. (Or maybe this process does exist and I don’t know about.) 2) I think the “how to contribute” docs could emphasise activities other than creating new features as a great place to start.It seems that review, testing and doco could all do with more hands (as on just about any project). So, encouraging this as a way to start on the project might help to get some more bandwidth in this area rather than people creating patches that the committers don’t have bandwidth to review. I would be happy to draft an update to the docs including some of this if people think it’s a good idea. Cheers Ben On Sun, 6 Nov 2016 at 06:40 Michael Shuler <mich...@pbandjelly.org> wrote: > On 11/04/2016 06:43 PM, Jeff Beck wrote: > > I run the local Cassandra User Group and I would love to help get the > > community more involved. I would propose holding a night to add patches > to > > Cassandra some will be simple things like making sure some asserts have > > proper messages with them etc, but some may be slightly larger. The goal > > being to just get people used to the process, to help make this a success > > it would be great if we could have support on getting the patches we > submit > > at least looked at briefly in 1 month. That timeframe allows us to talk > > about it at the next meetup and show people their contributions even > small > > ones are valued. > > This is a great idea and I have a suggestion that would benefit the > project as a whole, as well as help new people get used to the > development process: > > Document the process. > > Recently, the project included documentation in the source tree under > `doc/`, which is directly presented at > https://cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest/ > > The red bar at the top has a link to contributions, there are docs about > getting started with development, reviewing patches, and testing. If > those docs need updating for better readability, missing steps, hints > for new contributors, etc. I think this could be one of the most > valuable contributions a user group could make, as well as provide some > initial experience in the development process itself. > > > Before we did this night I would probably dig through some tickets and > get > > an example list going and any feedback notes on making the process easier > > would be great. > > Some more ideas: > The user group members could get themselves set up in JIRA in order to > review one another's patches, get a feel for testing patches, go through > the motions of *how* to contribute improvements, and again, get > documentation change patches up in JIRA, so everyone benefits from your > experiences, as the group works through the process. > > > Generally if there is anything you need from the meetups ask I know I > will > > do my best to get the local group to support things. > > Thanks for the interest! > > -- > Kind regards, > Michael >
