On 15/08/18 14:09, Jerrick Zhu wrote:
> Hi, mark
> 
> Sorry for disturbing all of you.

No need to apologise. The additional traffic wasn't, and isn't, a concern.

My concern was that it appeared that there was some sort of organisation
going on that the project wasn't aware of.

A secondary concern was that multiple teams seemed to be writing PRs for
the same issue.

> This is an activity for students to participate in open source project,
> it's held by department named BaiJi, Alibaba. They came us and asked us

If by us, you mean "the Alibaba employees who work on Dubbo" then that
request should have been redirected to the Dubbo community - which means
the dev@ mailing list.

If by us, you mean "the Dubbo community" then I don't recall seeing that
request on this list.

My concern here is that folks appear to have mixed up their "employee"
hat and their "Apache committer" hat. It is easy to do and so is
something to keep in mind. A good general rule is that whenever you find
yourself discussing anything related to the project at work (or anywhere
that isn't the project mailing lists), ask yourself "Why isn't this on
the dev@ list?". In my experience it is nearly always the case that the
conversation needs to move to the mailing list.

To provide some examples:

I am employed by Pivotal and Pivotal employs the committers on the
Spring Boot project which embeds Apache Tomcat. From time to time I
receive a work e-mail, slack message or similar along the lines of "We
think we have found a bug in Tomcat. Can you look at it?". My response
is invariably "Sure. Please create an issue in the Tomcat issue tracker
and I'll take a look."

I also receive direct email from Tomcat users asking for help with an
issue they are having. This happens often enough that I have a e-mail
template for the reply that directs them to ask their question on the
users@ mailing list.

> to
> provide some simple issues that students can fully engage OS project, and
> we agreed. We also wants more guys to join Dubbo, to contribute.

Please be aware that some people read "guys" as referring exclusively to
men. I recommend that you try to use a more inclusive term. I tend to
use "folks". "people" usually works as an alternative as well.

I do think this is an excellent way to increase interest in Dubbo and
expand the community. Please don't take anything I am saying as
discouragement of this effort. I am fully supportive of it.

> Now we have noticed that the PRs came together and generate so many emails,
> which had disturbed you. We will consider other more effective ways, such
> as one team fix issues separated from each other.

It bears repeating. The volume of email was not a concern. It was the
appearance of some sort of organisation of project effort going on that
the project community was not aware of. That rings alarms bells for me
in my role as a mentor.

Regarding separating issues between teams, there are pros and cons of
multiple teams trying to fix the same issue. The work might be
duplicated but, equally, they might learn from the different approaches
that the other teams took. I don't have a view one way or the other. All
I suggest (and this is more for the people managing the students) is
that the issue is thought about to ensure that the students get the best
possible experience.

> Do you guys have any other suggestions?

More of a comment than a suggestion. Given the volume of activity on the
notifications@ list, the activity on dev@ seems rather low. I'd expect
to see more discussion, more commentary, more planning given the
activity levels. It is possible that this discussion, commentary and
planning just isn't happening but I do find myself wondering if it is
happening off-list. If that is the case, it *really* needs to start
moving on to dev@ list.

Cheers,

Mark

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