It did my heart good today to hear, "i'm liking these "persona" labels =) ... because I can select a given persona and see issues with which I think I could help."
That was from
http://irclog.iq.harvard.edu/dataverse/2017-07-12Let me tell you about these new persona labels.
In my ongoing attempt to listen to what our users are telling us by opening GitHub issues, I started adding the following persona labels to open issues:
- Persona: Curator
- Persona: Depositor
- Persona: Sysadmin
- Persona: Superuser
- Persona: Downloader
- Persona: API User
- Persona: Hackathon Participant
I'd say these personas are still very much in flux, but if they're helping contributors find issues to help with, great! Mission accomplished!
If any of the personas don't make any sense to you or you thing we should modify them, please let me know!
If you click the IRC log link above you see me start talking about Silly Putty Day, a thought experiment that lead me to create these personas in the first place. What if once a year, we celebrated Silly Putty Day by picking an open issue to work on completely randomly.
First, we would print* all the open issues and tape them to the two-story glass wall in the Quantina. Here's what that wall looks like if you aren't familiar with it:
http://i.imgur.com/IgtJSAf.jpgThen, we roll some silly putty into a ball and chuck it at the wall, hitting one of the issues.
We pull the issue with the silly putty on it off the wall and ask ourselves, "What type of users will benefit from the resolution of this issue?" That's what the new persona label is supposed to answer. Resolving the issue will make curators happy, or depositors happy, or sysadmins happy, etc.
Wait a minute, you're saying. The numbers don't add up. We have 681 open issue and the persona labels have only been added to 500 of them. What gives? Well, probably some new issues have been added. Also, some issues really don't seem to apply to any of the personas above. A lot of them are things that only developers care about. So maybe we need "Persona: Core Developer" or something. I'm not even sure what we call ourselves so I figure we can add this persona later, if need be. To find all the issues that don't have any of the persona labels above, try the following query at
https://github.com/searchrepo:iqss/dataverse is:issue is:open -label:"Persona: Curator" -label:"Persona: Depositor" -label:"Persona: Sysadmin" -label:"Persona: Superuser" -label:"Persona: Downloader" -label:"Persona: API User" -label:"Persona: Hackathon Participant"
BOOM! There are the open issues I haven't added a persona label to. The goal isn't to obsessively add labels to every issue. The goal is to understand what our community is telling us by opening GitHub issues. I hope you find this interesting. Feedback is very welcome!
Happy hacking!
Phil
* Silly Putty Day is not environmentally friendly and I don't think we'd ever celebrate it. It's just a thought experiment.