Proposal: "Friend Of Jenkins" Revamp

[Oleg Nenashev]

Dear all,

We’ve recently had a few discussions with the board and Daniel Beck about the “Friend of Jenkins” plugin. This is a plugin referenced from https://www.jenkins.io/donate: “In showing our appreciation, we’ll send out a special "friend of Jenkins" plugin to those who have donated at least 25 USD / 25 EUR. This plugin adds a little icon in the footer section, telling that you are a friend of Jenkins. You can install this to your Jenkins to show off that you’ve helped us”. De facto, we have not been doing so in the recent years. There are a few problems associated with the plugin.

First of all, you can become a “Friend of Jenkins” only by donating money. IMO it goes against open source values, we should equally appreciate all kinds of contributions and avoid promoting money donations specifically. Secondly, the plugin is private source at the moment. It is weird to send a private source plugin to anyone, especially as appreciation. Thirdly, the plugin is dated. It has not been updated for a while, and it does not use modern build/test pipelines. For example the code still targets Jenkins 1.396 as the build target. Even if the code is tiny, it is not good to send such a questionable build to Jenkins users and suggest its installation. Last but not least, sending private builds in email is flawed on its own due to the risk of various social engineering attacks.

I suggest that we completely tear down the “Friend of Jenkins” program:

• We remove sections about “Friend of Jenkins” from the Donations page
• Instead of sending the plugin, the Jenkins Governance Board will focus on sending appreciation letters and recognizing donations through Jenkins social media. It should help us to build relationships with donors and hopefully get them involved in the community.
  

Later actions (no specific timeline):

• We (as community) open source the plugin as the standard Jenkins plugin on https://github.com/jenkinsci, update it to the modern development pipelines.
• We update the plugin to reference https://www.jenkins.io/participate/ instead of donations.  We might add “Donate” as a type of participation to the list
• We release the plugin as 2.0, without changing the artifact ID. Any user of the older private source version, if any, will be able to update via the update center. Any Jenkins user will be also able to install it via the plugin manager, no preconditions.
• We reference the plugin from the install wizard suggestions (not installed by default), and other places.

There were also some discussions about building signed versions of the plugin and somehow allowing to verify the “Friend of Jenkins” status. Although I proposed it, now I do not think it is really needed. We can discuss it for future iterations.

Would appreciate any feedback, and I suggest discussing that at the next Governance meeting.

Best regards,

Oleg Nenashev

Jenkins Governance Board

[Oleg Nenashev]

Would appreciate any feedback in this thread from the community

[Tim Jacomb]

+1 to proposal

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[Oleg Nenashev]

I have submitted https://github.com/jenkins-infra/jenkins.io/pull/4343 with text updates

[Mark Waite]

+1 from me on the proposal as well

[Gavin Mogan]

Honestly I'm not even sure it's worth spending the time to upgrade the plugin. It just adds a low res icon and a link. I vote for discontinuing the non distributed plugin.

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[Oleg Nenashev]

> Honestly I'm not even sure it's worth spending the time to upgrade the plugin. It just adds a low res icon and a link. I vote for discontinuing the non distributed plugin.

There are some merits in the icon/link: pointing end users of Jenkins to https://www.jenkins.io/participate/ . It **might** help to get more visitors of this page and, hopefully, new contributors.

We could also discontinue the plugin and just include the functionality into the Jenkins core. Should not be a big deal as long as it's opt-in in appearance.

BR, Oleg

[Zbynek Konecny]

Hi,

> recognizing donations through Jenkins social media

sounds like a better approach than having a plugin. If there is a need to go beyond social media endorsements and invest time in a technical solution, I think instead of having some 2.0 version of the plugin one should look into the Open Badges standard and maybe issue different badges for financial support / coding / reviews / translations (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Open_Badges ). AFAIK such badges can be exported to LinkedIn and may get some attention there.

Best regards,
Zbynek

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[Oleg Nenashev]

Hi Zbynek! I was also thinking about a badges-alike approach in the future. The Linux Foundation supports open badges on its platform, and we could somehow get access to it. E.g. I have a badge for speaking at cdCon there... IIUC it is based on https://info.credly.com/ .

We could definitely explore it more if someone is interested. Badges for financial donations are probably not the biggest use-case though.

Best regards,

Oleg Nenashev

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[Oleg Nenashev]

Quick update:

• My pull request for tearing down the Friend of Jenkins program on the website was merged after the approval by the board members and comments in this thread. Now https://www.jenkins.io/donate/#friend-of-jenkins points to this thread
• My estimation is that I would need 1 hour or so to update and open source the Friend of Jenkins plugin, it is not a big deal.
• I added the discussion of the next steps to the next Jenkins Governance meeting. If we agree on open sourcing the plugin and making it downloadable from the update center, I am ready to take that action item
  

Best regards,

Oleg