How to attract new contributors? + Community Discord
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(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
