Issue Assigning Conventions and Procedure

[Saurabh Daalia]

Hi Mentors and Members

I would like to discuss a little more clear and precise way of assigning issues to the new contributors. Yellowbrick is getting gradual traction which will intrigue new Open Source contributors to work on the issues.

Thus, My concern being is there a need to set up some specific(ground rules) on how to assign an issue to which contributor. 

For instance, many open source projects use the automatic issue tracker to assign the issue to contributors based on First Come Idea. Others follow the convention of a Pull-Request being a signifier of if an issue is assigned or not. 

For instance, on an issue opened by Benjamin #764, I asked if I could work on the issue, and soon enough I also mentioned working on the issue in my GSOC Proposal also. But recently another contributor opened a PR #813 . Personally, I felt this creates conflict and also wastes a lot of development effort as I also started working on the same issue as well. 

Thus, should there be a more clear issue assigning criteria that we should follow? And if yes, it should also be reflected in Contribution Guide as well.

Best FRegards

Saurabh Daalia 

[Benjamin Bengfort]

Dear Saurabh, 

Thank you for your email and the civil way that you presented your complaint and suggestion for improvement. We certainly take all feedback very seriously. 

Your feedback comes at a time when the Yellowbrick project is transitioning to a more formal governance structure. We're currently in the middle of this transition (stay tuned for more specifics soon), but in the interim, I will share some perspective on our organization to give you insight into why we do things the way we do, such as not assigning issues to specific people. 

Yellowbrick has been developed over the past 3 years through the active participation of 5-6 volunteers who do nearly all of the work: writing documentation, programming features, fixing bugs, and reviewing issues and pull requests in their spare time. Yellowbrick is not a commercial product nor sponsored by any commercial organization. No Yellowbrick volunteer is paid full time to work on Yellowbrick. We all do this in our spare time. 

Our original goal for Yellowbrick was to make it a welcoming place for new contributors. All of our efforts went into fostering contributions and guiding folks through the PR process. For this reason, we did not want to "assign" anyone a task or an issue. Not only does this preclude others from working on a task if it is "blocked" (reducing the number of contributions) it also give us a management burden to follow up with folks who assign themselves to tasks but do not follow up with a PR (which is very, very common). 

We are an open source project. This means all contributions are given freely without assignment or explicit management. In the case you presented, no one responded because we were completely overloaded; but if we had, we would have told you that we don't assign tasks and that we respond to those who open PRs related to issues (as you suggested in your email). There are certainly examples of this response in #437, #677, #476 and it is in the contributor guidelines as well.  This was an open issue; there is plenty of work to do on the project and we've never had a conflict before. I'm very sorry that we were overloaded and that we didn't manage to communicate this to you before you worked on it before someone opened the duplicate PR. 

But we are currently overloaded, and as I've said there is just a handful of us. Our recent NumFOCUS affiliation and growing popularity have transformed the project into something that a handful of volunteers cannot handle on their own. Whereas we used to have 3-8 communications a week with contributors, we now enjoy closer to 20-25 communications a week with contributors. This is too much for us to handle in our spare time after we put the kids to bed. 

Therefore in the coming weeks, Yellowbrick will adopt a Governance Document that formalizes our organizational structure and allows us to get more help from others. This document will describe the roles and responsibilities of contributors, how we handle requests on GitHub and how we make decisions on behalf of all contributors. I hope the adoption of this document will help address your concern, and will certainly give us a lot more direct management of the project. Please stay tuned for this and of course, we're happy to continue to work with you on future contributions to Yellowbrick! 

Best Regards,

Benjamin Bengfort

[Saurabh Daalia]

Hi Benjamin, 

Firstly, thank you so very much again for acknowledging the issue and taking out your time to write this very precise and clear response. I highly appreciate it. Thank you for being such a great mentor :)

I completely understand what you have addressed through your detailed answer. And I know its a fault on my end as well, I should have opened a PR when I decided working on the issue. My Bad 

I am looking forward to seeing the transition in the Yellowbrick Governance Structure. I would be more than happy to contribute if there is any help I can present as a newbie with Documentation or Planning or Anything. It will be a learning opportunity for me as well. As a matter of fact, I was going to ask that since the GSOC Application review period is in the process, is there anything that I can contribute to apart from listed issues. 

Again, Thank you so much for helping new contributors like us. 

Thank you and Regards

Saurabh Daalia