Ben, Thank you for providing two thoughtful, concrete recommendations. There is some good feedback in general on this thread, but I'm calling Ben's response out because point #1 is important to discuss and point #2 is immediately actionable.
> 1) I think some process of assigning a committer of a “sponsor” of a change > (which would probably mean committers volunteering) before it commences > would be useful. You can kind of do this at the moment by creating a JIRA > and asking for comment but I think the process is a bit unclear and a bit > intimidating for people starting off and it would be nice to know who was > your primary reviewer for a piece of work. (Or maybe this process does > exist and I don’t know about.) This is a good idea, but it assumes a single point triage and resource management that we don't really have right now. For the history of the project, we had triage in the form of sponsored resources flighting most of the new issues. This has made the rest of us complacent. It's probably the most immediate thing to fix and I don't know how to do that. Does anybody have any recommendations about ASF projects doing this effectively? Note that the folks from DS engineering are still heavily involved and I very much thank them for that, but diversifying is the only way to get us over our complacency. > 2) I think the “how to contribute” docs could emphasise activities other > than creating new features as a great place to start.It seems that review, > testing and doco could all do with more hands (as on just about any > project). So, encouraging this as a way to start on the project might help > to get some more bandwidth in this area rather than people creating patches > that the committers don’t have bandwidth to review. I would be happy to > draft an update to the docs including some of this if people think it’s a > good idea. Also a good idea and much more accessible/easily fixable. We will gladly look at any doc updates for this, looping in the broader community once published (this last part being key - I'm afraid if we ask for help too early, we'll get tons of interest to which we cannot reply and then be in even worse shape). -Nate
