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Re: Low level of activity

From: Stefan Fuhrmann <stefan2_at_apache.org>
Date: Sun, 5 Feb 2017 15:45:03 +0100

On 04.02.2017 17:53, Daniel Shahaf wrote:
> I wrote the following in a thread on private@, but the issue need not be
> discussed confidentially:
>
> Daniel Shahaf wrote on Fri, Feb 03, 2017 at 18:05:27 +0000:
>> I've noticed that some threads don't happen.
>>
>> Examples:
>>
>> - stefan2 solicited reviews of his authz branch. None happened.
>>
>> - SVN-4670 was filed with a trivial patch. Nothing happened.
>>
>> What worries me isn't the reduced activity — that's to be expected — but
>> the complete *lack* of activity around these and other threads. That
>> activity level is lower than I would expect, even taking into account
>> that we're now mostly volunteer-run.

Since more or less all committers contribute in their
spare time these days, not only the "intensity" of
interaction will go down.

What we do see instead is that people appear to be
very active for a short period of time - a day or two -
and then become silent for a longer period of time,
maybe for weeks at a time. Those periods of activity
often don't overlap, which makes interaction harder.
The amount of back and forth discussion will probably
go down.

I think that as a community, we need to adapt our
expectations / communication to that new pattern.
Things that might help:

* Allow for at least 2 weeks of reaction time for
   silent consensus etc.

* Send an notification post to dev@ before starting
   some larger work - people may not follow commits
   closely anymore. Not as a vote or anything but simply
   to keep people in the loop.

* "Ping" a thread that you _really_ want feedback on
   after 2+ weeks of inactivity.

None of these need to be codified; they seem like
pretty common sense for a project with much more
asynchronism.

-- Stefan^2.
Received on 2017-02-05 15:45:13 CET

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