This is a great discussion, thanks for opening, Carin!

As a newcomer to MXNet and Apache communities in general, I’ve been
considering what I can bring to the table here, and what importance it
would have to me.

I'm not employed by large organizations, and communities like this are
perhaps the only way to be involved in projects of such a large scale and
importance. An opportunity to join this type of team without the full
commitment of employment is fantastic! I see potential for this to be a
form of validation, a chance to meet others and build professional
relationships, and a vehicle to learn from some of the most well-educated
people in the industry.

That said, here’s what I’ve noticed thus far:

1. There is a healthy amount of activity in Github Issues, and the
committers are doing a great job at allowing newcomers to jump in. I was
able to get started on my first ticket within 10 minutes of searching thru
issues.

2. The dev mailing list is a great place to discuss all of the nuances of
the project. I also like meeting people and it would be rewarding to get to
know people in the community via Skype or in-person meetups! This doesn’t
have to be for everyone, and I don’t think it’s appropriate for Q&A, but
for some people a social element purely for the sake of putting names with
faces can be rewarding. I’m open to virtual meetups :)

3. My first commit was smooth. When approaching the second one, I’m hitting
some hiccups. For instance, I recently created a JIRA ticket based on a
Github Issue some users reported, and the ticket has been sitting for a
week without any activity. Should I just dig in and open a PR? How do the
commiters decide what can and can’t reasonably go into the project? We may
be able to make some changes to the contribution documentation or processes
to make it easier for first time contributors to ramp-up into regular
contributors?

4. I would love to see more discussion about the future of MXNet. I imagine
those who have been involved in the project for a long time have thoughts
about next major steps, but as an outsider I’m not sure where to find this
information. The roadmap on Github is fairly short-term and outdated, and
lots of interesting ideas are sprouting in projects like TF Swift as of
2019.

5. Something I’ve observed across many Apache projects: there isn’t much
focus on marketing. I wonder why? A tool like Tensorflow is reaching 10x
more people, mainly because of marketing.

Best,

Zach Boldyga
Scalabull  |  Founder
1 (866) 846-8771 x 101


On Thu, Mar 7, 2019 at 5:38 AM Tianqi Chen <tqc...@cs.washington.edu> wrote:

> what happens (also) happens in the mail-list.
>
> If there is a certain things or person’s contribution is only known by
> colleagues, it is a indication of things that should be improved toward
> more apache way.
>
> Tianqi
>
> On Thu, Mar 7, 2019 at 4:42 AM Isabel Drost-Fromm <isa...@apache.org>
> wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Mar 06, 2019 at 10:03:57PM -0800, Steffen Rochel wrote:
> > > I agree with Tianqi on "One approach toward building a more diverse
> > > community is to acknowledge the fact that we want to encourage
> > interactions
> > > in the Apache way beyond our physical cycle." However, I disagree with
> > his
> > > suggestion regarding "One principle to toward that is to encourage PMC
> > > members only nominate committers from other organizations" for the
> > > following reasons: [...]
> >
> > I spent quite some time digging remembering that a similar topic had been
> > discussed somewhere at the ASF at some point in time with many whys, pros
> > and
> > cons towards contributor employer diversity - finally found a long and
> > winding
> > thread there:
> >
> >
> >
> https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/7a7412316ddbe1d43f5fb3d3703ea25a6b26e56de602e27e175785c0@1337815698@%3Cgeneral.incubator.apache.org%3E
> >
> >
> > There is one answer in there from Roy Fielding which has a similar story
> > to the
> > one that you are describing, Steffen. My main takeaway of what was
> > discussed
> > back then: "Diversity is only a warning sign that means we need to check
> > for
> > decisions made in our forums and advise accordingly."
> >
> > The questions I personally tend to ask myself: How easy is it to follow
> the
> > project from just subscribing to it's mailing lists (remember the "if it
> > didn't
> > happen on the mailing list, it didn't happen"), get active, get involved,
> > be
> > treated as a fellow project member and be voted in as committer and PMC
> > member.
> >
> > For a more condensed text on the topic of "ASF projects are made of
> > individuals"
> > you might also want to check out the ASF guidelines over there:
> > https://www.confluent.io/apache-engineering-guidelines/
> > https://www.confluent.io/apache-guidelines
> >
> > Related material was published at ApacheCon :
> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFNE0IpKOxU
> >
> > There's also lovely content that was recently produced over at
> > dev@community:
> >
> >
> https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/183nXPAxpJymQBOYOt1FnFaahRcQskIvOyIvHRC6UAnE/edit#slide=id.g4a86a2ca5a_0_69
> >
> >
> > Isabel
> >
> >
>

Reply via email to