Results of Community Research

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

On 01/19/2010 01:33 AM, Frédéric Buclin wrote:
> I'm a bit surprised that nobody mentioned that 1) we have much less
> visible bugs in our code since the QA team exists (July 2005:
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bugzilla:QA), and so it's much less obvious for
> people to fix bugs they don't see unless they look at the code itself.

	That's possible. Some people do get involved by first providing a bug
fix. I think that people stay around to write features, though.

>> 	Now, #2 and #3 above pretty much cover my recommendations on how we
>> should behave toward new community members: be really, abnormally,
>> really, really kind, and don't be mean.
> 
> <troll>I hope this doesn't involve sending flowers to all our
> contributors with a greeting card.</troll> More seriously, "abnormally,
> really, really" sounds excessive to me and is not something I will fall
> into.

	Well, maybe not flowers. :-) I think that it's important to be nicer
than we otherwise might think that we have to be, though. Particularly
when we're all far away from each other and can't fix things through
direct in-person conversation, it's important not to cause upsets
between developers. Also, it's important to be really encouraging and
kind to people, so that they see that this is the type of community that
they want to be involved in. After all, nobody wants to voluntarily be
involved in a community that's abusive to them in any way, even if it's
professionally abusive. On the other hand, people do like to be a part
of a group that's kind of them and where they feel like their
contributions are important, so that's the kind of community I want to
create.

> Please don't do that! reviewers@ and review-requests@ have different
> goals. And I recently unsubscribed from review-requests@ for a reason
> (after being 5 years in this mailing-list). Keep them separate, and just
> email reviewers@ to subscribe to review-requests@ if they want to. I
> don't see why you can/should/would be allowed to force them to read all
> review requests. 

	The fact is, the project started to decline when we separated them, so
I think that we should try to rejoin them for at least a few months and
see if that changes things. This is something that we can *actually do*
to try to improve the size of the community. Do you want to be the only
person doing the majority of the development and reviews for the rest of
your life?

> And if you are the requestee, you already get review requests directly
> anyway.

	Yes, but the point is to get the review requests a broader audience.
Maybe somebody requests review from you, but Gerv also feels like he
can/wants to say something about the patch, and he's able to get to it
before you. It allows all the reviewers to participate together as a
community.
	
	-Max
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