Building a healthy RPM Fusion contributor community (was: Re: "RPM Fusion is ready for F10 announcement" for fedora-announce-list)

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

On 25.11.2008 13:37, Michael Schwendt wrote:

Sorry, I wanted to find a bit more time to write a proper answer, which 
took me a while to find time for.

> On Tue, 25 Nov 2008 12:15:59 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> 
>> What RPM Fusion really needs is IMHO not an announce writer. RPM Fusion 
>> for a healthy and hopefully growing project afaics need way more people 
>> that take care of all those "other things" 
> How about a fat "Help needed" section on the main web page?

Yeah, I had thought about that as well. But:

> Just a few lines that explain what kind of help is needed and how
> contributors may join and become productive.

That and someone they can talk to that helps with the first steps -- 
e.g. a mentor. Leaving people working alone/sending them straight to the 
lists afaics only works if the one that wants to help really is pushing 
forward -- otherwise people offer to help but nobody tells them "hey, 
would you want to work on foo or bar". Or people try something and run 
into issues that are not getting solved -- like Chris with the 
planet/blog stuff, that now waits for thias to adjust the DNS :-/

> The lack of information is
> not specific to RPM Fusion, it is a growing problem also for Fedora.

+1

> IRC-centric organisation and desolate Wiki pages.

The latter IMHO is the bigger problem, and it's results in a higher 
hurdle to climb when trying to get involved. And that is not good for us 
in the long term. Livna showed that, as the entry-hurdle was way to high.

> Few people in key
> positions (approx. the same people who are praised in official
> announcements) with not enough time to handle everything. Hurdles
> for potential contributors.

Yeah.

>> - infrastructure (that is a whole big field with lots of sub-points I 
>> won't list here;
> Still you need to start somewhere if you're overwhelmed and seeking
> for help. What can potential contributors expect? What target OS?
> SSH access? What privileges? Any issues with trusting strangers?

Sure. And as you said: start somewhere is the point. For infrastrucuture 
that would be up to our infrastructure leader -- Xavier. But lead is 
likely the wrong word, as we is the only real contributor that takes 
care of our infrastructure (with a bit help from me -- but as I said 
months ago on this list: I don't really want to spend my time on 
infrastructure things, so I try to keep it to a minimum). I don't want 
to think what might happen to RPM Fusion if Xavier gets hit my a bus 
tomorrow :-/

>> dep-checker script is one example)
> It's not rocket-science. [...]

I know. I actually considered to work on it. But then I said to myself 
"I did so many things over the past few months for RPM Fusion; I won't 
touch that and just wait if or when somebody else steps up to do it; 
maybe then others get more involved"

> However, the "somebody" to do it is missing. Not just at RPM Fusion. Look
> at EPEL!

EPEL is a really good example, as it's one of the reasons why I'm a bit 
worried about RPM Fusion in the long run.

EPEL's self-organization was far from perfect when I ran the steering 
committee, but it afaics got a lot whole lot worse since I said "okay, I 
want to have some more free time to get RPM Fusion running; can somebody 
else please take care of EPEL" and handled the position over. Since then 
EPEL afaics is lingering and not really working towards a better and 
brighter future. Sure, EPEL grew a lot since I moved away from it  -- 
but that's mainly  due to more and more Fedora contributors starting to 
build their package for EL. But nobody really cares of EPEL as a whole 
afaics. The steering committee for example not even asked me "Why didn't 
you do the testing->stable move as usually" when I stopped doing them 
for the first time at the end August this year (it just happened due to 
me vacationing; it wasn't on purpose).

I'm sure that things in EPEL land sooner or later will improve again, as 
it already has a big community -- sooner or later someone from that 
community will step up and work towards improving things. But the 
contributor community for RPM Fusion is a whole lot smaller; and most 
contributors seems to be focused on packaging (just like in EPEL). 
Nearly nobody seems to be interested in "keeping things together and 
running well" or "improving things/creating a healthy project that 
attracts new contributors and grows". The long time it took us to start 
for real proves that from my point of view.

But maybe it's just me and I'm expecting to much...

 > [...]
>> - make sure things are documented properly
>> - keep the wiki in shape
> I think the German "Weniger is mehr!" translates to something like
> "Do no more than what is absolutely necessary". Focus on brief
> information that's easy to find instead of creating a maze like
> the Fedora Wiki.

Strong +1 (that's also the reason why I put the first sentence on 
http://rpmfusion.org/Guidelines )

>> - make sure people get answers to their questions
> Make sure people ask in places where you can guarantee that questions are
> seen. Frequently asked questions => bottom-up FAQ building.

+1

And not only docs for contributors are needed. Docs for users are also 
needed -- especially for the graphics drivers. Bugs like

https://bugzilla.rpmfusion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=197
https://bugzilla.rpmfusion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=204

(I had to reopen both, as the underlying problems was not really 
addressed) and posts like

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2008-November/msg02798.html

show that.

Cu
knurd