Re: Beam's recent community development work

[Huxing Zhang <hu...@apache.org>]

Thanks for sharing, really nice post. I've learned a lot.

I think this can be a good example for incubating project like Dubbo,
which is facing the same issue here: not enough committer to review
the issue report and pull request.


On Sat, Jun 30, 2018 at 2:15 PM, Kenneth Knowles <kl...@google.com.invalid> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> The ASF board suggested that we (Beam) share some of what we've been doing
> for community development with dev@community.apache.org and
> members@apache.org. So here is a long description. I have included
> dev@beam.apache.org because it is the subject, really, and this is & should
> be all public knowledge.
>
> We would love feedback! We based a lot of this on reading the community
> project site, and probably could have learned even more with more study.
>
> # Background
>
> We face two problems in our contributor/committer-base:
>
> 1. Not enough committers to review all the code being contributed, in part
> due to recent departure of a few committers
> 2. We want our contributor-base (hence committer-base) to be more spread
> across companies and backgrounds, for the usual Apache reasons. Our user
> base is not active and varied enough to make this automatic. One solution
> is to make the right software to get a varied user base, but that is a
> different thread :-) so instead we have to work hard to build our community
> around the software we have.
>
> # What we did
>
> ## Committer guidelines
>
> We published committer guidelines [1] for transparency and as an
> invitation. We start by emphasizing that there are many kinds of
> contributions, not just code (we have committers from community
> development, tech writing, training, etc). Then we have three aspects:
>
> 1. ASF code of conduct
> 2. ASF committer responsibilities
> 3. Beam-specific committer responsibilities
>
> The best way to understand is to follow the link at the bottom of this
> email. The important part is that you shouldn't be proposing a committer
> for other reasons, and you shouldn't be blocking a committer for other
> reasons.
>
> ## Instead of just "[DISCUSS] Potential committer XYZ" we discuss every
> layer
>
> Gris (CC'd) outlined this: people go through these phases of relationship
> with our project:
>
> 1. aware of it
> 2. interested in it / checking it out
> 3. using it for real
> 4. first-time contributor
> 5. repeat contributor
> 6. committer
> 7. PMC
>
> As soon as we notice someone, like a user asking really deep questions, we
> invite discussion on private@ on how we can move them to the next level of
> engagement.
>
> ## Monthly cadence
>
> Every ~month, we call for new discussions and revisit ~all prior
> discussions. This way we do not forget to keep up this effort.
>
> ## Individual discussions
>
> For each person we have a separate thread on private@. This ensures we have
> quality focused discussions that lead to feedback. In collective
> discussions that we used to do, we often didn't really come up with
> actionable feedback and ended up not even contacting potential committers
> to encourage them. And consensus was much less clear.
>
> ## Feedback!
>
> If someone is brought up for a discussion, that means they got enough
> attention that we hope to engage them more. But unsolicited feedback is
> never a good idea. For a potential committer, we did this:
>
> 1. Send an email saying something like "you were discussed as a potential
> committer - do you want to become one? do you want feedback?"
> 2. If they say yes (so far everyone) we send a few bullet points from the
> discussion and *most important* tie each bullet to the committer
> guidelines. If we have no feedback about which guidelines were a concern,
> that is a red flag that we are being driven by bias.
>
> We saw a *very* significant increase in engagement from those we sent
> feedback to, and the trend is that they almost all will become committers
> over time.
>
> ## Results
>
>  - Q1 we had no process and we added no new committers or PMC members.
>  - Q2 when we tried these new things we added 7 committers and 1 PMC
> member, with ~3~4 obvious committer candidates for next time around, plus
> positive feedback from other contributors, spread across five companies.
>
> We've had a pretty major uptick in building Beam as a result.
>
> ## Review-then-commit
>
> We are dedicated to RTC as the best way to build software. Reviews not only
> make the code better, but (with apologies to ASF/GNU differences) as RMS
> says "The fundamental act of friendship among programmers is the sharing of
> programs" and reviews are where we do that.
>
> As a minor point, we also changed our "review-then-commit" policy to
> require that *either* the reviewer or the author be a committer. Previously
> the reviewer had to be a committer. Rationale: if we trust someone as a
> committer, we should trust their choice of reviewer. This also helps the
> community, as it engages non-committers as reviewers.
>
> ----
>
> If you made it through this long email, thanks for reading!
>
> Kenn
>
> [1] https://beam.apache.org/contribute/become-a-committer/



-- 
Best Regards！
Huxing