2008/4/27 Denis Leroy <denis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
I think many of the people who have left active contribution life, myself included, simply feel overwhelmed with the amount of beaucracy. Why complain, we already feel like we are being forced around by boards and commitees who meet and decide the fate for us all and it doesn't really feel like they are working for us. It feels very much like we have no influence. More beaucracy is not the solution here, I think lessening the effort needed to get help and let your voice be heard is. Let us start a Fedora Mentor program for new contributors, to guide through the little kinks with a smile and so new people have a friendly face to turn to instead of endless wiki pages. Right now being a contributor feels a lot like being thrown out of the nest by your sponsor and expected to fly, getting reviews done has a discouraging nepotistic feel to it, you can have packages sitting around for months if you don't know anyone. We need some kind of network here to catch these little stumbling blocks that frustrate new developers.
We need to ensure a way to remove the bottlenecks, help explain how to do a good review, how to get the information mentioned in those guidelines. Everytime we get a contributor who does not master this we simply add to the workload of people who do and we add to the backlog of packages that sit in the review queue. More contributor might in fact end up being a bad thing. Let us foster a culture where it is okay to ask questions and ask for help, and make it easy to do so. Encourage developers with many packages to draw in new developers, hold their hand as co-maintainers for one of their packages and eventually let them own it. This way we would also avoid the risk we currently have where if something happens to Hans or he decides to switch priorities in life, 200 packages are without an owner overnight.
- David
Patrice Dumas wrote:Hmm why is it costly ? I've had a few conflicts resolved that way, and in a reasonably speedy fashion. I don't think I've ever seen a call for help on fedora-devel-list going unanswered...
On Sun, Apr 27, 2008 at 08:55:16AM +0200, Matej Cepl wrote:
So, should be there a Fedora Court of Arbitration? ;-) I mean seriously, in so huge and disintegrated body as Fedora community is now, conflicts are bound to happend, and we may need some semi-official means of settling them.
It is already the case. The rule is more or less, bring it to the lists
and then to fesco. But this is costly so having propoer guidelines to
follow like AWOL are better.
Going over this thread this morning, it read something like this :
13:21 [a]: I quit because of this problem I didn't tell anyone about!
13:23 [b]: It's an outrage! What is FESCo doing ?!?
13:25 [Fesco]: ¿ Qué ?
I think many of the people who have left active contribution life, myself included, simply feel overwhelmed with the amount of beaucracy. Why complain, we already feel like we are being forced around by boards and commitees who meet and decide the fate for us all and it doesn't really feel like they are working for us. It feels very much like we have no influence. More beaucracy is not the solution here, I think lessening the effort needed to get help and let your voice be heard is. Let us start a Fedora Mentor program for new contributors, to guide through the little kinks with a smile and so new people have a friendly face to turn to instead of endless wiki pages. Right now being a contributor feels a lot like being thrown out of the nest by your sponsor and expected to fly, getting reviews done has a discouraging nepotistic feel to it, you can have packages sitting around for months if you don't know anyone. We need some kind of network here to catch these little stumbling blocks that frustrate new developers.
We need to ensure a way to remove the bottlenecks, help explain how to do a good review, how to get the information mentioned in those guidelines. Everytime we get a contributor who does not master this we simply add to the workload of people who do and we add to the backlog of packages that sit in the review queue. More contributor might in fact end up being a bad thing. Let us foster a culture where it is okay to ask questions and ask for help, and make it easy to do so. Encourage developers with many packages to draw in new developers, hold their hand as co-maintainers for one of their packages and eventually let them own it. This way we would also avoid the risk we currently have where if something happens to Hans or he decides to switch priorities in life, 200 packages are without an owner overnight.
- David
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