papercuts-ninja team mailing list archive

[Chris Wilson <notgary@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Sponsorship sounds like a great idea. We would need a very reliable way of
tracking who fixed what bug though, since using the 'assigned to' field on
the bug task and the points count can easily be gamed if we're not paying
attention. Perhaps we could set up a simple website where we can track the
top contributors to the project, with links to all their contributions. I
actually bought 'hundredpapercuts.com' last year (and then did nothing with
it). Perhaps we could make use of that.

I think sponsorship is a great idea, and I think we could persuade
Canonical to offer some sort of reward to the top contributors. They
already offer a number of 'Conference Packs' to people wanting to set up an
Ubuntu presence at conferences. Perhaps they could be persuaded to put
together a 'Contributor Pack' for the active contributors each cycle.


On 9 May 2013 13:45, Timothy Arceri <t_arceri@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi Chris,
>
> I wouldnt be to hard on yourself. Although we didnt hit 100 fixes we did
> (I believe) fix more issues than in the previous couple of releases and due
> to targeting core libraries such as GTK we fixed some very high impact
> bugs, one was even proposed as a google summer of code project for Ubuntu.
> As for why we failed to reach 100 bug fixes is VERY clear to me. We simply
> do not have enough contributing developers, you can triage all the bugs you
> want be it means nothing if there is no one to fix them. I was hopeful when
> there was an increase in people asking how they could help but it didnt
> seem to result in many fixes, my guess is due to lack of experience. If we
> are serious about fixing more bugs we need to attract more developers to
> the project, the question is how? I have thought about this many times, and
> the best thing I can think of is getting some kind of sponsorship, in
> otherwords some rewards/prizes for developers. A reward for the most bugs
> fixed for a release, a reward for the the highest profile bug of the
> release etc, make it into a competition, make it fun! If we are successfull
> enough maybe even get a sponsor for each and every bug. Anyway its just one
> idea. But if you really want serious developers working on this project you
> need to reward them for their work (or at lease make it more fun), the more
> I contribute to open source the more I realise that unlike what I was lead
> to believe most open source developers are paid one way or another. As for
> how or who we get to sponsor the project I have no idea. Maybe we could get
> Valve to throw some steam vouchers our way, maybe we could crowd source
> monetary funds via something like http://pledgie.com, be creative I'm
> sure there are many other ways to make the project fun to contribute to.
> Anyway maybe I'm just a dreamer but I think we need to think big to really
> get things moving.
>
> Anyway as to why my contributions stopped (aside from becoming a new
> father) I was just suffering burnout. I was feeling pretty good as I hit
> the double figures of bug fixes but it started to feel as though I was just
> working hard for free while everyone I was colaborating with with were
> getting paided for there contributions it was very demotivating. I know I
> might sound selfish but it takes a large amount of time to work on bug
> fixes and its very hard to fit in when you have a family and full time job.
> I have been thinking about trying out a crowdsource funding project of my
> own so that I could take time off work and work full time for a period of
> time fixing bugs voted on by the backers but I'm not very confident it
> would be successful.
>
> Anyway I'm starting to talk crap now, this is just things as I see them.
>
> Tim
>
>   ------------------------------
>  *From:* Chris Wilson <notgary@xxxxxxxxxx>
> *To:* Ubuntu Papercuts Ninjas <papercuts-ninja@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> *Sent:* Thursday, 9 May 2013 9:06 PM
> *Subject:* [Papercuts-ninja] Paper Cuts in 13.10
>
> Hey all,
>
> 13.04 has just wrapped up and it's time to start thinking about what we're
> going to do in the next cycle. I don't think anyone would dispute the fact
> that we never came close to fixing 100 bugs over the over six months, and I
> think we should take some time to figure out why that happened, and what we
> could do better in this cycle.
>
> If anyone has anything they'd like to say about how we've been working,
> then please come out and say it, no matter how critical it is. The only way
> we're going to get better at this is by facing up to the truth, no matter
> how hard it is.
>
> A few points I'd like to make:
>
>    -  I dropped off the radar for the past few months as real life has
>    gotten in the way. I fucked that one up and I'll look at managing my time
>    better. One thing I'm thinking of doing is setting aside one evening each
>    week for Ubuntu stuff, so no matter what else happens, I've always got the
>    slot of time to give to the project.
>    - We didn't target all 100 bugs at the very start, which made it
>    harder for people to know what there was to do.
>    - I went a little mad shortly after the start of the 13.04 cycle, and
>    changed up a bunch of the milestones around the second month. That won't be
>    happening again because we're going to talk together about what we want to
>    do for the coming cycle and stick with it. I hope that by the end of next
>    week (Sunday 19th) we can have our milestones and bug targets sorted out.
>    - It's been mentioned before that it's not clear from our wiki pages
>    how a new user should get involved with the project. I agree with that and
>    we should have a look at our 'getting started' documentation to figure out
>    how we can improve it.
>
> Those are my thoughts on what happened last cycle and what we can improve
> next cycle. what do other people have to say?
>
> Chris
>
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