Comment by schneems
5 years ago
I would love to see more talk from companies about how to foster meaningful contribution instead of focusing on measurable contribution.
I recently read "Working in Public" which was great, I recommend it. One interesting observation that was made: The perceived pipeline of user => casual contributor => active contributor => maintainer...is a lie. In the book they argue (convincingly) that you do not convert someone from casually contributing to actively contributing, it's instead that active contributors also make casual contributions.
What does that mean in this context? This company is operating under the assumption that they are helping by getting more people into the pipeline. In reality, what we need are active contributors who are invested in projects, not fly-by-night-i-want-a-shirt contributors.
For context I maintain https://www.CodeTriage.com which is a community of about 55,000 devs interested in open-source.
A substantial fraction of "serious" OSS is now developed by paid, fulltime contributors paid by big vendors (I work for such a company). A casual contributor has a much higher bar to overcome in terms of understanding the codebase and being able to create a useful contribution. But a typo is easy to fix and probably won't spend weeks in pull request ping pong hell.
Many repos have a sharp bifurcation between tiny PRs by passers-by and big chunky ones by the fulltimers. The space between is a desert.
> But a typo is easy to fix and probably won't spend weeks in pull request ping pong hell.
Yeah. How the maintainer(s)s of a repo respond to trivial typo fixes (real ones, not spam) is also a good way to test things / check for any weird attitudes.
Most of the time, PR's are accepted easily and swiftly. But sometimes (rarely), the response is strange or off putting.
There is the occasional PR that just sits there forever without being looked at too, which just shows the repo at that URL is dead / unmaintained. Also good to know before putting much time/effort in. ;)
> The space between is a desert.
Who’s going to put in all the time to learn to understand a repo, only to make a small change. At that point you might as well keep going.
Larger open source projects tend to fare better; especially well-documented projects with many small components. I can think of projects such as Django and Wine, both of which very often get small-to-medium contributions from drive-by devs who want to fix "that itch".
That just means many people will never start.
Yes, precisely.
> A substantial fraction of "serious" OSS is now developed by paid, fulltime contributors paid by big vendors
I disagree.
Could you elaborate? I would like to understand.
While I exclusively use Github, I was wondering why CodeTriage only supports Github, why not Gitlab/Bitbucket? I was looking into the issues and Found this https://github.com/codetriage/CodeTriage/issues/613, but was wondering if it's true even today?
As Github has been acquired by Microsoft, I would love to see other alternatives being supported by more projects/sites.
When I find something annoying in an open source tool that I use or missing some functionality that would be helpful for me, then I consider contributing, but only to get the things I need and nothing more. Once I get the PR through, I don't have any more interest in contributing unless I face another issue that bothers me enough.