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Re: Low level of activity

From: Branko Čibej <brane_at_apache.org>
Date: Sun, 5 Feb 2017 23:30:24 +0100

On 05.02.2017 22:22, Branko Čibej wrote:
> On 05.02.2017 22:02, Stefan wrote:
>> On 2/5/2017 15:45, Stefan Fuhrmann wrote:
>>> 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.
>> Wouldn't it be possible to also consider getting some
>> funding/sponsorship/donations?
>>
>> If enough money gets donated maybe some of the existing committers could
>> arrange something with their dayjobs (as in being able to work like 20%
>> on SVN) and therefore be able to contribute more time on SVN than they
>> can right now?
>>
>> Also if some specific features would be put up as examples for
>> committers who would volunteer to work on a feature, that might be
>> caught up by companies who are willing to pay for getting the feature
>> into the subversion core (LuaJIT used that approach, for instance, quite
>> successfully).
> The ASF does not accept donations toward any particular project. Whilst
> we might encourage companies to fund individual developers, we solicit
> donations for specific features.

I mean "can't solicit" of course.

-- Brane
Received on 2017-02-05 23:30:34 CET

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