On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 9:06 AM, Patrick Hunt <ph...@apache.org> wrote:
> In my experience "growing the community" is hard. It's very easy to say,
> hard to do.
Agreed -- and that why so many podlings put so much effort into it over the
course of incubation and find it a challenging hurdle to overcome. When a
project enters incubation, its core developers should expect that they are
going to do a lot less coding and a lot more recruitment and community
management for a long while.
* Raising awareness of the product through talks, articles, etc.
* Writing up "how to contribute" documents.
* Teeing up easy starter issues.
* Responding to any contributions quickly and thoroughly.
* Involving the community in development discussions.
* Engaging contributors and collaborating with them to develop *their* ideas
through code review, constructive feedback, freewheeling design
discussions, being flexible about integrating new ideas, and so on.
* Ensuring that the codebase is easy to approach (builds easily, well
commented, etc.)
There's a lot of stuff we can do to grow communities, and though it's always a
lot of work, the techniques are reasonably well understood around Apache by
now. How much of that has Sentry done? And where in the "open source
funnel" has there been the greatest narrowing?
1. People hear about the product.
2. People download, install, and try out the product.
3. People keep using the product, becoming users.
4. Users offer up their first patches, becoming contributors.
5. Contributors get invited to become committers.
6. Committers get invited to become (P)PMC members.
While it might be "artificial" to consider promoting three committers who may
or may not be ready, it's reasonable to ask, how much have the senior members
of the Sentry community invested in developing those three contributors, and
have there been other contributors who have been lost along the way?
But getting three new committers is actually pretty great! So how about the
Sentry community focuses in on those three and asks, if we believe they are
not yet ready, what can we do to facilitate their development and get them to
the point where they *are* ready? Because if one or more becomes a PPMC
member that the rest of the community has full confidence in, the "grow the
community" critieria will be satisfied in both letter and spirit.
Hope this helps,
Marvin Humphrey
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