(Re-)building an inclusive SageMath community. IV: The role of focus in discussions for inclusiveness

[Matthias Koeppe]

Previous posts in the series:
https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/OeN8o14s6Jc/m/ChnpijP3AgAJ,
https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/xBzaINHWwUQ/m/Tq17YRqOAAAJ,
https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/6HO1HEtL1Fs/m/2yBTxg6QBgAJ

A key reason for the extraordinary success of GitHub Issues and Pull
Requests (and their equivalents in other systems) as productivity
tools in the software development world is the sharp and narrow focus
of the discussions there.

What may often be overlooked though is how crucial keeping this sharp
and narrow focus is for the inclusion of neurodiverse/neurodivergent
participants in the community. Meandering discussions without clear
scope or goal, general chatter, off-topic comments, etc. can make the
discussion simply inaccessible to these participants, and distractions
by off-topic comments from the technical content of the discussion can
dramatically reduce these participants' productivity.

But also for neurotypical participants, off-topic noise in discussions
can be a problem, and there is a separate serious inclusion issue. As
just one example, consider a new contributor who looks up a PR
interesting to them, but the discussion appears to be between senior
contributors on matters apparently unrelated to the PR. This can
create the doubt whether review comments are still welcome.

Experienced developers usually open Issues and Pull Requests with a
suitable, sufficiently narrow scope. But when the scope of an Issue/PR
or focus of a discussion at some point is recognized as not suitable
(usually too wide), then various tools and actions are available to
Maintainers (and some to other participants) to take corrective
action. Examples:
- Opening one or several separate Issues, each with a clearer, narrower focus
- Closing an Issue in favor of the opened separate Issues (the old
Issue should be referenced in the newly opened Issues)
- Updating title / description of the Issue to reflect the main focus
of the discussion (old titles and old versions of the description can
still be accessed)
- Marking comments as "off-topic", "outdated", or "resolved" (see
https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/Sm-HG9zQTQY/m/Ffs3CIPMAgAJ);
people with read access to the repository can simply click on them to
expand them
- Cherry-picking parts of a PR that can be reviewed more easily and
opening a separate PR for them for review (this creates development
velocity and also facilitates review of the original PR, which becomes
smaller after the split-out PR has been merged into the mainline).

All of these are routinely done by responsible Maintainers in well-run
software development projects.

I suggest that we revise our Developer Guide to include a discussion
of these and other important topics.

Matthias
--
Dr. Matthias Koeppe . . . . . . . . http://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~mkoeppe
Professor of Mathematics

[Dima Pasechnik]

Neurodivergent or not, people have trouble with contributing to SageMath due to lack of clearly set and followed goals (we cannot even agree on a new motto). It doesn't help to stay on focus in particular PR if the general focus of the project is not sharp, in the sense of lack of consensus on the general directions. In fact, precisely the latter makes people go offtopic in PRs and issues, as the discussions there are getting political.

And badly organised very flat structure of the code and the associated infrastructure.

And some developers rude to the point of blocking other participants on GitHub, and boycotting them here.

None of the above can be fixed by improving the Developer Guide.

Dima

[Georgi Guninski]

I think it it clear that sage doesn't have community.
Unfortunately this scales to the real world community.

[Grégory Vanuxem]

Hello,

Le dim. 25 août 2024 à 18:42, Georgi Guninski <ggun...@gmail.com> a écrit :

I think it it clear that sage doesn't have community.
Unfortunately this scales to the real world community.

From my point of view, community can be read as « virtual » community. Like any other open source projects opened to other contributors.

Greg

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[Matthias Koeppe]

On Sunday, August 25, 2024 at 9:42:35 AM UTC-7 Georgi Guninski wrote:

I think it it clear that sage doesn't have community.

In this case, read the title of this series as "Building an inclusive SageMath community".