Re: Recognizing non-{code,docs,bits} contributors

[Philippe Cloutier <ch...@gmail.com>]

Greetings Benson and Hyrum,

On 2010/12/30 22:07:32 Benson Margulies wrote:
 > I may be speaking out of turn, but why not elect them directly to the
 > PMC? If they make a giant non-coding contribution, they belong on the

 > committee even if they aren't committers.

According to the Becoming a PMC member page, that follows becoming a 
committer in the contributor ladder: 
https://community.apache.org/committers/becomingapmcmember.html

Sally Khudairi has since started a program to change that in 2019, but 
I'm afraid these efforts have not yet paid off: 
https://lists.apache.org/thread/78m6ysjf0rl0kfblz707s9x2jstcrs0k


 > On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 3:56 PM, Ted Dunning <te...@gmail.com> wrote:
 > > […]
 > >
 > >
 > > On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 12:41 PM, Hyrum K Wright 
<hy...@hyrumwright.org>wrote:
 > >
 > >> Quick question for ComDev folks: Over in the Subversion project, we've
 > >> had a number of people who have contributed in somewhat intangible
 > >> ways.  There are several denizens of the users@subversion.apache.org
 > >> mailing list who know how to use Subversion far beyond many of the
 > >> developers' capabilities, and who are valuable assets to the
 > >> Subversion community at large.
 > >>
 > >> What's a good way to reward these individuals?  If somebody were
 > >> submitting patches as fast as these folks answer questions, they'd
 > >> have commit privileges long ago, and probably be on the PMC by now.
 > >> But in this case, the contributions are much more intangible, though
 > >> just as important.  How can we reward / recognize these people (thus
 > >> encouraging them to continue to participate by having an "ownership"

 > >> stake in the project)?

I'm afraid your question is not that “quick”😅, but thank you very much 
for bringing this up. Having played that role in a few channels / CBPP 
communities, I can say that doing this at a professional level is 
demanding… and rarely rewarded much😞

User support does not *necessarily* contribute to the product. If you 
simply tell users to update to the latest version 100 times a day, 
you're hardly improving the product. But at least the most 
conscientious/skilled would definitely do more. We would do tasks like:

 1. Filing software bug reports
 2. Reporting that the website is down
 3. Fixing/updating/improving the factoid database (which more or less
    constituted documentation)
 4. Directing users asking how they could get involved to development
    channels, or answering directly

Effectively, the best of us acted as liaisons, and those who had the 
required skills and permissions sometimes did more (like 
fixing/improving documentation).

So, when you talk about "intangible ways", do you mean things like #1, 
#2 or #4? In all of these cases, it is *possible* that these tasks end 
up not contributing to the product, but statistically, a diligent, 
active and skilled volunteer will actually contribute to the product 
quite quickly. They may not patch the code themselves, but they do 
contribute to code, *indirectly*.

I am not sure what you mean by *how* can we reward. If you're asking 
which recognition these volunteers should get, I would say top support 
veterans deserve the same recognition as you would grant to volunteers 
with the same impact writing promotional material, doing publicity, 
reporting issues or recruiting.

If you are asking what *process* can achieve such valorization, I would 
suggest taking a look at All Contributors, keeping in mind the software 
is far from maturity: https://allcontributors.org/en/

Otherwise, httpd has had a static page for that for decades: 
https://httpd.apache.org/contributors/
Now, I can't mention that without specifying that the reason I landed on 
this topic is I am trying to advise on how to address that page’s bad 
outdatedness: 
https://lists.apache.org/thread/29r5kygynzb336t3ocy94l2roq9lk8hm

-- 
Philippe Cloutier
https://www.philippecloutier.com