[DISCUSS] How to speed up contributions?

[Bolke de Bruin <bd...@gmail.com>]

Dear Atlas Dev Community,

Myself and my team have been contributors to Apache Atlas. We have contributed in the area of authentication and kubernetes/docker improvements. We like to contribute in the context of performance and usability. 

Unfortunately, we also notice that it is hard to get attention to the contributions. Saying it out loud: the dev list is hardly alive with close to none discussion (e.g. see the Apache Atlas 2.1 release ‘thread’ of February), Jira items feel lost and abandoned, items on the review board take months to get integrated although they are “ship it” marked. There are some ‘fast-tracked’ items, but they seem to come from a selective group of people and feels not inclusive. This results in loss of interest/energy of potential contributors.

What can be done to improve this situation? I think there are a couple of options that could help with improving this. I don’t want to stipulate any of them but want to put them up for consideration, like:

1. Add new committers. I have not seen the latest report to the ASF, but I am going to assume that assume that it has been a while that new committers have added to the project.
2. Allow and accept PRs on Github. The ASF has moved to GitHub and it does give the same if not better and more native workflow for contributors.
3. Consider moving to Github issues. GH Issues and JIRA are both not perfect, but Jira does tend to make discussions less visible.
4. Integrate with a CI like Travis or Azure pipelines. Visibility whether a particular PR passes tests increases confidence in the PR and speeds up contributions. ASF has a contract with Travis although Azure pipelines seem to gain more popularity.

What do you think?

Kind regards,
Bolke

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