[TYPO3-core] Expectations, Experience and Culture Matter

[François Suter]

Hi Ben,

> I have just been reading this article from David Eaves and I would like you to
> read it to. I have talked to David a couple of times and he had a keynote at
> OSCON this year called The Science of Community. What he mainly writes about in
> this article is how newcomers submit patches, wait endlessly, get dissed while
> waiting and then stop contributing. I would like to hear from you if this sounds
> familiar and if you have any ideas on how to improve that? I am aware of the
> fact that we do not do a good job currently at providing human readable
> information on what to do when you are new to the project.

I think we took a step in the right direction when we introduced the 
position of Bug Manager. It's good to have someone whose task is to 
"welcome" bug reports and patches. I don't know how closely followed it 
is though. I know I'll be on next week, but it has been weeks since 
anyone reported on his/her activity as Bug Manager, which doesn't mean 
they did nothing.

The only difficulty with being Bug Manager is that you never know how 
your week will really be. During my last stint I could do absolutely 
nothing, because of various emergencies at work and at home. So the 
mileage varies quite a bit.

Having a dashboard of pending patches would be great IMO: see how many 
patches are pending, how long they have been in the queue. A very 
synthetic view. I don't know if Gerrit can produce that or provide data 
that could be used to that effect.

We should also make sure that information about people in charge is up 
to date. I've been meaning to discuss that for ages about the Scheduler, 
for example. I still appear as the project's leader, but I'm too busy 
with the documentation to do that. This generates false expectations. It 
would be better if someone else picked up that position. Actually pretty 
much the whole should be cleaned up. At least Christian appears as 
co-leader and he has definitely been active.

That's it for a few random thoughts on the matter.

Cheers

-- 

Francois Suter
Cobweb Development Sarl - http://www.cobweb.ch