On 2014-04-15, 6:59 PM, Gavin Sharp wrote:
>
> My point (and I think Gijs' as well) is just that not all people who
> express a desire to contribute can be successful in doing so, for
> various reasons, and "respond more to people's comments" on its own is
> unlikely to be a cost-effective or scalable solution. We need to have
> systematic solutions for avoiding expending large amounts of effort
> for minimal return, and efficient ways to direct potential
> contributors to the right opportunities.
>
> I know mhoye has given those problems lots of thought, so this isn't
> news to him, but it felt worth clarifying in the context of this
> thread.
There's a lot to unpack here.
There's no question that there will be some people who will not be
effective contributors after any amount of effort by any number of
established Mozillians. It's unfortunate, but those people exist and
nobody who takes on a mentoring role should feel bad or hesitate for a
second to say somebody isn't ready, or needs to show some work or
acquire some more basic skills before they can proceed. Mentoring isn't
doing the work for someone, and if that's what it's turning into,
absolutely try to direct that contributor to somewhere they might be
more successful. We have some great introductory and non-code
contribution channels now - #introduction, SuMo, QA, Localization, the
Reps, a bunch of others; the systematic solution I'm hoping we can adopt
in the near term is "know the other engagement pathways and send people
to them as soon as it occurs to you that you should."
Nevertheless, I don't think that the possibility that somebody _might_
be a time-sink means we can leave them hanging,
I'm making a very narrow claim, here. All the data I've got says that
these are not people who are expressing a desire to contribute and then
failing to deliver; these are people who are expressing a desire to
contribute and then inadvertently being ignored. I know the solution
I've proposed isn't all that pretty, but I'm looking at a set of
mismatched expectations between how people interact with a service we
own and control outright and how people interact with other people in
about three-fifths of the entire world. In that context an inelegant
solution we can push to production over the weekend looks like a pretty
sweet deal.
I agree that responding to more people's comments on its own isn't
cost-effective or scaleable, but getting new contributors to the point
where they can mentor the next generation of contributors themselves,
that scales like crazy. In fact, until late in the industrial
revolution, that was _the only thing that had ever_ scaled. And I don't
see a way to get from here to a million Mozillians that doesn't involve
both talking to lots of new people and leveling up the people we have.
If we get to the point that just talking to the number of new
contributors who want to fix bugs becomes an unsupportable burden for
Mozilla's engineers we will absolutely have to figure out how to address
that, but from up here in the cheap seats I bet that looks an awful lot
like winning.
- mhoye