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[104.178.186.189]) by smtp.gmail.com with ESMTPSA id e9e14a558f8ab-3a0c022f1a3sm12813565ab.88.2024.09.20.07.20.45 for (version=TLS1_3 cipher=TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 bits=256/256); Fri, 20 Sep 2024 07:20:45 -0700 (PDT) Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2024 10:20:42 -0400 From: Taylor Blau To: git@vger.kernel.org Subject: [TOPIC 07/11] New Contributors and Discord Message-ID: References: Precedence: bulk X-Mailing-List: git@vger.kernel.org List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit In-Reply-To: How to attract new contributors? + Community Discord ===================================================== (moderator: Jonathan N + Calvin Wan, notetaker: Emily) * jonathan: we talk about this a lot 🙂 let's avoid the common pitfall of catering to the tiktokkers and the youths (hypothesizing about "current generation"): * but, our contributor base isn't representative of our user base * and our current contributor base doesn't reflect exactly the skills needed to improve git - like interface design is not our strong suit. how to attract people who are better at our weak spots? * taylor: this weakness is an existential problem for Git. jj, gitbutler, gitkraken, etc * mark: +1 * peff: one size doesn't fit all, us deciding not to include a GUI is understandable, but workflow improvements like jj's are pretty interesting * jonathan: ex. in hg there's someone very involved in UX review. we don't have someone like that * missing other disciplines - tech writing, product management, UX research, etc. * common problem in open source but would be cool if we could get good at attracting/retaining these people - and cool for the not-eng-discipline people * patrick: we could adopt a style guide or guideline but we still wouldn't be good at enforcement * john: people need to know what they can contribute to - cf. project tracking discussion later on * jonathan: instead of trying to guess - can we think generally, how do we make work easier to approach? how can we lower the barrier to entry? * patrick: someone is writing third-party rewrite of gitglossary. huge improvement over what we have, well made, but the person didn't want to come back to contribute. was afraid of the community giving pushback * patrick was willing to handhold this potential contributor, but it didn't seem like enough to make this person comfortable * jonathan: related to community discord server - what does it mean to function better as a community? * calvin: the entry point doesn't need to be discord, but we should pick some entry point that lets users contribute other than mailing list participation * and need to be able to navigate new contributions comfortably * brian: how to write text that's accessible to non-native english speakers, for example? the mailing list isn't great for these kinds of changes. * discord is proprietary, that is sometimes an issue * moderation on discord is an issue - having an unmoderated discord will actually drive away contributors. that means actual dedicated moderation * balancing between sufficient moderation (list) and ease of use (discord) * patrick: new contributors sending changes but the changes being ignored * brian: git-send-email is a barrier, but so are PRs/MRs in some cases * jonathan: the localization example is a good one - the translation layer is in github, uses a very typical dev workflow, and that's working well. there's a strong community there. are there other places we can do something similar? * peff: can we do that with documentation? * jonathan: can we have a documentation maintainer? hypothetically: we hire a tech writer, and that tech writer acts as the documentation maintainer only. curating existing docs, making sure docs changes get good reviews, how to attract new tech writer contributors, etc * peff: can we manage documentation as a subproject that doesn't use the mailing list, and make tech writers' lives easier? * how to negotiate that with code changes that require doc changes is trickier, we'd have to figure out how to do it, but doable * jonathan: readthedocs * jonathan: we don't advertise well that we can accept contributions in a different way if people are committed to the improvement * peff: sometimes a mentor can "translate" a contribution. Individual contributors are already interested in mentoring, do we need more/different mentoring? * mentoring list isn't working well yet - maybe it's too faceless? should we get a list of individuals who want to mentor? * taylor: should we literally put photos of the people on the mentoring list up somewhere? "here are real humans, they will reply to you on git-mentoring@"? * jonathan: in-person meetups help with this. emailing is transactional, but e.g. python meetups are interactive * patrick: we had the git berlin meetup a few months ago, lot of people came, we did lightning talks and user conversations. it worked well - let's use that model more * taylor: hey, we can help spend money on that * brian: those are cool but for example, houston linux users group is quite small. meetups like this can be helpful, but it's not the only source. * peff: it doesn't really scale up. python users group are user-to-user, doesn't necessarily draw python project contributors. * nasamuffin: Gerrit has a community meeting once/month, should we use discord for f2f video meetups? * peff: if people want to do big group meetups great. we could also use it for 1:1 meetups that way, and advertise that it's an option