papercuts-ninja team mailing list archive

["Leonardo \"LeartS\" Donelli" <learts92@xxxxxxxxx>]

I got interested in Ubuntu development (I should say bugfixing) less than a
week ago, and I joined the team a few days ago. So, I am a complete newbie.
As such, I think a big problem it's the feeling of being overwhelmed. I had
to learn at least the basics debian/ubuntu packaging, Baazar, Launchpad,
Bug reporting, patches, upstream/downstrem, etc.

I followed the Ubuntu Packaging Guide, which does not a bad job of guiding
you through the steps, but the material is large, and naturally a lot of
different questions and doubt arises, and the material in which you could
find the answers is, in my opinion, not well organized. I've found myself
using google a lot, while I think it should be a natural flow from a main
"documentation index" to various pieces of documentation that can lead you
and "show you around", introducing the different bricks separately, but in
a common context.

Another thing I think it's important it's the community: where is the
community in reading thousands of line of documentation, searching online
for answers, or having a reply on a comment you made on a bug on launchpad
(maybe with months of delay..). No, I think the community should be active,
fuzzy and immediate, and I that prospect I really think we should 'push'
IRC. But really push it, like the first two lines of every documentation
page aimed at newbies should be: "Fell overwhelmed? Come talk to us on IRC,
channel <#channel>!" with a link to a guide for those who don't know IRC.
On IRC:
 - You are surrounded by people like you and more expert than you, which
makes you think: "Oh, good, I'm not the only idiot newbie here!" and "Oh,
good, there is someone who knows something here!"
 - Specific question can be answered without having to find it at line 540,
between parenthesis, of a man page of a software you didn't know you
weren't using, that you found out reading a 2007 mail exchange in a
mailing-list archive (that kinda happened)
 - You can be directed to the right piece of documentation: not RTFS-style,
but if someone is lost in the immense world of references, docs and
manpages, a good samaritan can point him/her in the right direction
 - Everybody likes hanging out with cool and fun people. (I've no doubt we
all are)
And avoid hundreds of overly specific, unpopulated channels. A new user
who's thinking about contribuiting wants to find himself in a welcoming
sparkling community (Ubuntu?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(philosophy)), not in a cemetery with
10 lines of chat a week. So, a general-purpose channel for everyone who
helps, be it designer, translator, a curious passing by, artist, people who
just file bugs etc.. #i-wanna-help-ubuntu

All this i think is appealing to new, non expert users, maybe a bit less to
more experienced ones, for which I think the reward idea is good. It's not
about the 'tangible reward', it's about being reckoned and thanked for your
voluntary work: nobody likes to spend hours fixing a bug which affects 3
people in the world and that nobody know you've fixed. On this matter, I
think a "thanks" system as the one on XDA is a good think.

TL;DR:
A possible recipe
 - Well organized documentation
 - IRC as main vector of active *community* (#I-wanna-help-ubuntu)
 - Assure people are reckoned and thanked for their work.

Sorry for the long post and for my english.


On 9 May 2013 16:04, Alberto Salvia Novella <es20490446e@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>  What I can say about attracting more contributors is my own experience:
>
>    - Many of the bugs I filled never get attention, although they are
>    very well documented and are about very obvious problems.
>    - Since the 22nd of March y expended tons of time trying to get into
>    the BugControl team to help triaging those unattended bug reports, but
>    after six responses I'm still not in, and every of them took me hours to
>    write. In fact the initial application took me about eight hours.
>
> So my conclusion is no one will like to contribute because they perceive
> their effort as useless. Other things that can influence the people to
> quit, including myself, are:
>
>    - The operating system being very buggy; and not underdone, but crude
>    sometimes 🙈
>    - Canonical promoting Amazon<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com_controversies>and a platform as Steam 🙊
>    - Including tons of useless privative applications in the Software
>    Center, all together along with the libre ones with no distinction 🙈
>    - The free software movement founder openly confronting Ubuntu 🙉
>    - Ubuntu.com sifting from rather speaking about values to features and
>    convenience, and by so not choosing to target market to the general public
>    but to the mindless 🙊
>
> So Ubuntu is just in the point it can become something great or just a big
> deception.
>
> 🙏
>
>
> El 09/05/13 14:45, Timothy Arceri escribió:
>
>  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> <notgary@xxxxxxxxxx>
> *To:* Ubuntu Papercuts Ninjas <papercuts-ninja@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx><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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