papercuts-ninja team mailing list archive

["Timothy Arceri" <t_arceri@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

FYI ----- Forwarded message -----
From: "Timothy Arceri" <t_arceri@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Leonardo \"LeartS\" Donelli" <learts92@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Papercuts-ninja] Paper Cuts in 13.10
Date: Fri, May 10, 2013 8:48 am

Hi Leonardo,

Welcome to the project and thanks for the good feedback. Beginner documentation is an ongoing issue and one we attempted to address last release, we can always use improvements in this area. 

I took a look at your eye of gnome patch and it looks pretty good well done. I have provided a review with a couple of comments you will need to address then hopefully the upstream dev should have no problem accepting it. Again welcome and I look forward to seeing more fixes from you over the next release cycle.

Tim ----- Reply message -----
From: "Leonardo \"LeartS\" Donelli" <learts92@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "Ubuntu - Paper Cuts Ninja team" <papercuts-ninja@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Papercuts-ninja] Paper Cuts in 13.10
Date: Fri, May 10, 2013 5:26 am

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
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>

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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