Hello everyone, TL; DR; I wanted to start a non-technical discussion about being (even more) welcoming community.
It's a long read - following some deep discussions I had recently and you might not be interested in it, so feel free to skip the entirety of it. I also believe this might become quickly a controversial topic and mis-communication over email can easily happen - so I would like to ask everyone to be considerate and open-minded when responding. *Some context - how welcoming are we now ?* First of all I think we are doing a lot as community to be really welcoming and friendly. A lot that we do is really opening up in various ways to new community members, users, existing contributors etc. We are responsive, helpful, we try to actively reach-out to get users opinions (the survey). We are open to invite non-code-committers to get "committer status" (that's highly encouraged by the Apache Software Foundation!) or even PMC members (yeah!). We organise events (Meetups and upcoming Airflow Summits), workshops for users and new contributors. We are making it easier for new contributors to start contributing - by environment and documentation improvements. At the same time we have certain expectations/barrier of entry. It's not super easy to join the community and you must really earn your status to become a committer/PMC member. I think we are fairly good as a community in enforcing that in deliberate and firm ways - and all this without being rude or aggressive. I remember one of the first emails when I joined the community where I was firmly but friendly reminded that in this community decisions are made by the community and not a bunch of people talking at slack and agreeing to something between them. That was a very important lesson to me - and first trigger to learn what ApacheWay is. And it was super cool even though I felt I have to apologize for my lack of understanding how this all works (which I did). We have certain expectations for PRs/code - some enforced automatically, some by comments/discussions/review process. And we have expectations for engagement of people submitting the code. They are supposed to follow-up their PRs - being responsible to get the PRs to submission and engage committers when they need it. We also encourage people not only to finger-point things to fix but also engage and help with fixing things they find or even improve the processes. I think it's rather good mixture of openness/barrier of entry. When someone new joins any community - has to first adapt and show how they can be valuable for the community before he or she can influence the way community works. So it's great that there are firm boundaries and expectations and that we clearly explain them to anyone that tries to join and we expect those people to follow the expectations before we invite them further after they "earned" the status. This is best described in the "meritocracy" rule defined here: https://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html#meritocracy . We are following it really well I think. I believe in many ways we are much better than a number of other open-source communities and we are following ApacheWay fairly well. And I've heard personally a member of the board of the Apache Software Foundation praising how welcoming Apache Airflow community is. *So why the discussion at all if we are in such good shape ?* I just wanted to see if we can do better than that - and whether we need to do better currently at all. I think it's fairly easy to overlook the moment when we should do something more. Maybe we can change something to be even more welcoming. Maybe we can get people engaged who currently do not engage because it is too difficult? Maybe we miss another point of view because of that? Maybe some of the rules we have should be updated? Maybe people who feel excluded do not speak here because they feel the barrier of entry is too big and they are afraid they will not be heard or will be ignored or will be shouted at. I think it's better to discuss such things when everything looks great and when there is a good "vibe" in the community rather than being triggered by people complaining after it becomes a problem and when the "vibe" deteriorates. The trigger for my thoughts was a looong discussion I had with one of the attendees of PyDataWarsaw conference a few weeks ago at the after-party. We talked for several hours I think, and we were the last ones to leave the party grounds (yes it was 3 am or so :D ). The person I spoke to raised a few important topics - like "not everyone has enough courage to openly speak at the discussion list first" or "unconsciously people are valuing less contributions by women" (there is a study confirming that https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/12/women-considered-better-coders-hide-gender-github) and "some people need a kind of mentorship when they enter new community and after the introduction they become great contributors" - and he had some really good examples for all those statements from his own experience. After the discussion he read about Apache Way (as I advised him), looked at our discussions and he wrote to me a few days ago that he sees how welcoming we are and that we are addressing a lot of the concerns he has in really good way - but nevertheless it stuck with me a bit and I thought - maybe he is right that we should discuss it. For example - while we have two women on the PMC member list, almost all the people committing the code are male (I believe). This - of course - reflects the state of our industry and is nothing new, but maybe we are (unconsciously) doing something in our discussions in devlistt or slack or reviews that puts off people who otherwise would be valuable to our community? The friend of mine who triggered my thinking had a great point that not everyone new has the courage to speak openly at the devlist or slack initially. Maybe we should reach out in a different way to those people? Or maybe we should think about some kind of mentorship for new people so that we can guide people through the first stages of becoming contributors and navigate the way our community works? It looks like we already have people from all over the world - US, Europe, India, Japan, Australia, China. We have meetups in almost all of those places. But maybe we could do more to get more people contributing/users invited from some places (for example we have no meetups in China yet and not a lot of people from South America I think). Again - maybe we can do something about it ?. I know there was an event in Mexico where we had Airflow workshop - maybe we can reach out to people there somehow :) ? There was also a great presentation about Chinese user community at the ApacheCon Europe few months ago https://aceu19.apachecon.com/session/inviting-apache-flinks-chinese-user-community on how difficult it is to get people in China contributing because of the language barrier. Maybe we should get more workshops for new contributors in Chinese/Mandarin in China initially and get some contributors from there (writing description of a PR might be easier even for someone who has difficulties speaking english or you can have someone who will be your local mentor for that). I do not have concrete proposals yet, or I do not ask you to have them immediately. I don't even know yet if we should do something or not. But I wanted to open up discussion to hear what others think about it - both active members of our community and those who are just listening and rarely discuss. Maybe we are really in a good state and we should just continue? Or maybe there are some easy things we can do as a community to get better at being more welcoming ? Also maybe we should forward the discussion elsewhere (users@?/Slack?/Meetups?) so that others who are not reading the devlist can chime in ? I'd really love to hear what others think about it! Again - please be considerate and open-minded - this might quickly become a controversial subject and miscommunication is almost certain, so let's all be careful with words and statements. J. -- Jarek Potiuk Polidea <https://www.polidea.com/> | Principal Software Engineer M: +48 660 796 129 <+48660796129> [image: Polidea] <https://www.polidea.com/>
