Re: [DISCUSSION] Growing the Git community

[Klaus Sembritzki <klausem@gmail.com>]

Hello all,

1. Long texts stem from false (You can deduce anything from something
that is wrong).
2. TL;DR is therefore sane.
3. (Inclusion & Diversity) is a tautology, it includes all of it.

Cheers,
Klaus Sembritzki


On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 8:35 PM Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> During the Virtual Git Contributors' Summit, Dscho brought up the topic of
> "Inclusion & Diversity". We discussed ideas for how to make the community
> more welcoming to new contributors of all kinds. Let's discuss some of
> the ideas we talked about, and some that have been growing since.
>
> Feel free to pick apart all of the claims I make below. This is based
> on my own experience and opinions. It should be a good baseline
> for us to all arrive with valuable action items.
>
> I have CC'd some of the people who were part of that discussion. Sorry
> if I accidentally left someone out.
>
> I. Goals and Perceived Problems
>
> As a community, our number one goal is for Git to continue to be the best
> distributed version control system. At minimum, it should continue to be
> the most widely-used DVCS. Towards that goal, we need to make sure Git is
> the best solution for every kind of developer in every industry. The
> community cannot do this without including developers of all kinds. This
> means having a diverse community, for all senses of the word: Diverse in
> physical location, gender, professional status, age, and others.
>
> In addition, the community must continue to grow, but members leave the
> community on a regular basis for multiple reasons. New contributors must
> join and mature within the community or the community will dwindle. Without
> dedicating effort and attention to this, natural forces may result in the
> community being represented only by contributors working at large tech
> companies focused on the engineering systems of very large groups.
>
> It is worth noting that this community growth must never be at the cost
> of code quality. We must continue to hold all contributors to a high
> standard so Git stays a stable product.
>
> Here are some problems that may exist within the Git community and may
> form a barrier to new contributors entering:
>
> 1. Discovering how to contribute to Git is non-obvious.
>
> 2. Submitting to a mailing list is a new experience for most developers.
>    This includes the full review and discussion process.
>
> 3. The high standards for patch quality are intimidating to new contributors.
>
> 4. Some people do not feel comfortable engaging in a community without
>    a clear Code of Conduct. This discomfort is significant and based on real
>    experiences throughout society.
>
> 5. Since Git development happens in a different place than where users
>     acquire the end product, some are not aware that they can contribute.
>
> II. Approach
>
> The action items below match the problems listed above.
>
> 1. Improve the documentation for contributing to Git.
>
> In preparation for this email, I talked to someone familiar with issues
> around new contributors, and they sat down to try and figure out how to
> contribute to Git. The first place they went was https://github.com/git/git
> and looked at the README. It takes deep reading of a paragraph to see a
> link to the SubmittingPatches docs.
>
> To improve this experience, we could rewrite the README to have clearer
> section markers, including one "Contributing to Git" section relatively
> high in the doc. We may want to update the README for multiple reasons.
> It should link to the new "My First Contribution" document
> (https://git-scm.com/docs/MyFirstContribution).
>
> 2. Add more pointers to GitGitGadget
>
> We have a reference to GitGitGadget in the GitHub PR template to try and
> get people who try to submit a pull request to git/git to instead create
> one on GitGitGadget. However, that captures contributors who didn't read
> the docs about how to submit! (This is somewhat covered by the "My First
> Contribution" doc as well, so making that more visible will also help.)
>
> Could we reference GitGitGadget as part of the Submitting Patches doc
> as well?
>
> 3. Introduce a new "mentors" mailing list
>
> From personal experience, all new contributors at Microsoft (after Jeff
> Hostetler at least) have first had their patches reviewed privately by
> the team before sending them upstream. Each time, the new contributor
> gained confidence about the code and had help interpreting feedback from
> the list.
>
> We want to make this kind of experience part of the open Git community.
>
> The idea discussed in the virtual summit was to create a new mailing
> list (probably a Google group) of Git community members. The point of
> the list is for a new contributor to safely say "I'm looking for a
> mentor!" and the list can help pair them with a mentor. This must
> include (a) who is available now? and (b) what area of the code are they
> hoping to change?
>
> As evidence that this is a good idea, please see the recent research
> paper ""We Don't Do That Here": How Collaborative Editing With Mentors
> Improves Engagement in Social Q&A Communities" [1].
>
> [1] http://www.chrisparnin.me/pdf/chi18.pdf
>
> When asking your first question on Stack Overflow, this group added
> a pop-up saying "Would you like someone to help you with this?". Then,
> a mentor would assist crafting the best possible question to ensure
> the asker got the best response possible.
>
> I believe this would work in our community, too. The action items
> are:
>
> a. Create the mailing list and add people to the list.
>
> b. Add a pointer to the list in our documentation.
>
> Note: the people on the mentoring list do not need to be
> "senior" community members. In fact, someone who more recently
> joined the community has a more fresh perspective on the process.
>
> 4. Add an official Code of Conduct
>
> So far, the community has had an unofficial policy of "be nice,
> as much as possible". We should add a Code of Conduct that is
> more explicit about the behavior we want to model. This was also
> discussed in the meeting with wide approval.
>
> 5. Advertise that Git wants new contributors
>
> After we put items 1-4 in place, we should reach out to the
> general tech community that we are interested in new
> contributors. It's not enough to open the door, we should
> point people to it.
>
> This item is much less explicit about the _how_. This could
> be done at the individual level: posting to social media or
> blog posts. But perhaps there is something more official we
> could do?
>
> III. Measurement
>
> How do we know if any of these items make a difference? We
> need to gather data and measure the effects. With the size
> of our community, I expect that it will take multiple years
> to really see a measurable difference. But, no time like
> the present to ask "What does success look like?"
>
> Here are a few measurements that we could use. Each "count"
> could be measured over any time frame. We could use major
> releases as time buckets: v2.22.0 to v2.23.0, for example.
>
> 1. How many first-time contributors sent a patch?
>
> 2. How many contributors had their first commit accepted into
>    the release?
>
> 3. How many contributors started reviewing?
>
> 4. How many total patches/reviews did the list receive?
>
> What other measurements would be reasonable? We could try
> building tools to collect these measurements for the past
> to see historical trends. Based on that data, we may be
> able to set goals for the future.
>
> With such a small community, and an expected small number
> of new contributors, it may also be good to do interviews
> with the new contributors to ask about their experience.
> In particular, we would be looking for moments where they
> had trouble or experience friction. Each of those
> moments is a barrier that others may not be clearing.
>
>
> I look forward to the discussion.
>
> Thanks,
> -Stolee