For anyone that’s interested, I’ve submitted my doc changes for point 2 below (emphasising contributions other than new features) here: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-12906
I haven’t added anything about the sponsor/shepherd idea as doesn’t seem to be agreed at this point. Cheers Ben On Mon, 7 Nov 2016 at 09:34 Nate McCall <zznat...@gmail.com> wrote: > Ben, > Thank you for providing two thoughtful, concrete recommendations. > There is some good feedback in general on this thread, but I'm calling > Ben's response out because point #1 is important to discuss and point > #2 is immediately actionable. > > > 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.) > > This is a good idea, but it assumes a single point triage and resource > management that we don't really have right now. > > For the history of the project, we had triage in the form of sponsored > resources flighting most of the new issues. This has made the rest of > us complacent. It's probably the most immediate thing to fix and I > don't know how to do that. > > Does anybody have any recommendations about ASF projects doing this > effectively? Note that the folks from DS engineering are still heavily > involved and I very much thank them for that, but diversifying is the > only way to get us over our complacency. > > > 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. > > Also a good idea and much more accessible/easily fixable. > > We will gladly look at any doc updates for this, looping in the > broader community once published (this last part being key - I'm > afraid if we ask for help too early, we'll get tons of interest to > which we cannot reply and then be in even worse shape). > > -Nate >
