I just attended a great session about the OpenStack Upstream Institute,
and I would love to see us do a similar thing. Perhaps starting at
ApacheCon 2020, but possibly as stand-alone roadshow type events. Just
something to consider, as a way to build skilled contributor communities.
Basic idea: One day (or up to 2, depending) on how to contribute to
$project. They do intro "how to do open source" content, and then drill
down to project-specific content later in the day.
By the end of the day, students will have pushed one patch, with good
commit message, to some project. But much of the content is more about
culture than specific project or technical details.
Perhaps this is something that the Training PMC should be doing instead
- but I think all of those people are here, too.
I've pasted my full notes from the meeting below, for those that want
more context.
Resources:
Upstream institute wiki page:
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/OpenStack_Upstream_Institute
Upstream training guide: https://docs.openstack.org/upstream-training/
OpenStack Contributor guide: https://docs.openstack.org/contributors/
OpenStack community page: https://www.openstack.org/community/
Full Notes:
Ildiko and Kendall presented today about the OpenStack Upstream Institute.
OUI is an in-person training about how to contribute to OpenStack, as
well as being general open source advocates. Open design, development,
community, and source.
First training was 5 years ago before OpenStack Summit.
Training is to help newcomers get over the hurdles of contributions.
Training has evolved over the years based on lessons learned.
Training is 1 or 1.5 days long. Lots of Q&A and exercises.
Covers governance, release cycle, how teams are structures, how doc/code
development is going. Account setup is part of the day. Walk them
through sending their first patch and navigating the review process. How
to revise changes. Git basics. How you communicate with the community.
How to test your changes. Running and configuring devstack.
Training is very interactive, to keep people engaged. Lots of exercises
to ensure that the attendees grasped the material and can act on it.
Have project mentors attend, so that they can recommend “low hanging”
issues that the trainees can address.
This is *not* training about how to use/administer OpenStack itself.
No criteria for people to join the training. All levels of experience
are represented, and the day has to be crafted around that, so sometimes
it takes all available time, and sometimes it’s done much faster.
There is a lot of culture that is passed along to the participants,
which includes open source norms. These are also informed by the 4 Opens.
People involved in the training include board members, PTLs (project
technical leads), mentors, current developers. Representation from all
of the various major sections of the community. Largely a community
effort, rather than just pushed by the Foundation.
All of the slides/text are translated into multiple languages so that
they can be presented to local audiences more effectively.
Many of the projects host project-specific onboarding. Culture, system
setup, other technical details.
There is also a mentoring program which attendees can participate in if
they need more help.
Training is the day before OpenStack Summit/Open Infrastructure Summit.
Also at regional OpenStack Days, Open Infra Days, which are smaller
events all around the world.
Encourage people to keep in touch with one another after the training.
This is especially useful with regional trainings, so that people are in
the same region/timezone, and have a local project community.
When space/time isn’t available at an event, run office hours where
people can drop by and ask questions, get help.
Local events, a couple dozen attendees. At major international events,
more like 60 - 80 attendees.
Resources listed in the etherpad:
Upstream institute wiki page:
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/OpenStack_Upstream_Institute
Upstream training guide: https://docs.openstack.org/upstream-training/
OpenStack Contributor guide: https://docs.openstack.org/contributors/
OpenStack community page: https://www.openstack.org/community/
May be other things :)
Started with lecture format, and evolved into the current, more-hands on
format, over the years based on attendee feedback and attention span.
Writing exercises is very challenging.
Quizzes at the beginning of the second day to ensure that they retained
everything from the first day. Review the answers afterwards.
Attendee surveys afterwards to improve for the next time.
Success metrics: Do you advocate at your company? What have you done?
Have you pushed a patch since then?
Track contributor activity after the training, to see if they got it.
(Be sure to register with the same email/github that you use to
contribute, so that this reflects actual activity.)
There’s at least one company who is using this training material
internally for their own employees. This is great, but also makes it
harder to collect success metrics in those cases.
Investigating doing online training in the future.
Working on breaking training into general open source content and
project specific content so that other communities can reuse the core
content and build their own around it.
--
Rich Bowen - rbo...@rcbowen.com
http://rcbowen.com/
@rbowen
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