Working groups

[Rich Bowen]

Hey, friends,

I’m recovering from FOSDEM, and going through my notes. I would like to propose 
a somewhat unformed idea that I would like to pursue for the next year or so - 
the idea of forming working groups here in ComDev, to pursue different tasks.

The reasoning for this is that, while I have eleventy million things that I 
want to accomplish under the umbrella of of ComDev, I have a tendency to just 
go do stuff myself, because building consensus is *hard*. That leads, 
consistently, to three outcomes:

• The stuff doesn’t actually get done, because my list is long
• Nobody else does it either, because that’s Rich’s project
• I get super frustrated that nobody is helping, even though I created that 
situation myself, and know that I created it.

This is hugely unproductive, and I would like to see if we can take a step 
towards making it easier for people to participate in narrowly defined ways 
that don’t seem quite as daunting as our current way of operating.

A working group would have a topic (“Website” is the first one that I’m likely 
to propose), a defined scope of work, and regular check-ins where progress is 
assessed, and narrowly defined action items can be volunteered for.

I love the way Kubernetes tackles this (see 
https://github.com/kubernetes/community for some of that) but we tend to 
believe, here at Apache, that this is too heavy on the structure side. I have 
come to think, over the past few months, that we need more structure, because 
our “just go jump in and do stuff!!” approach is hugely intimidating to 
beginners, and is no better than “figure it out yourself, I’m too busy” in 
terms of trying to engage new contributors.

Now, I know that this email is very fluffy and philosophical. I’ll be proposing 
a specific WG later this week, as soon as soon as I can write it up, and asking 
for folks to participate.

More, and more rambling, thoughts on this topic, here: 
https://drbacchus.com/the-many-hats-of-a-maintainer/ - if you’re interested.

— 
Rich Bowen
rbo...@rcbowen.com

[WG: Website] Proposal - Website working group

[Rich Bowen]

Proposed: Form a formal Website working group.

(I am aware that I haven’t defined “working group” yet, and I do, in fact, 
intend to propose a Working Groups Working Group which could possibly formalize 
what a working group looks like. I have some ideas, but no desire to go define 
it on my own.)

The Website WG would, obviously, be responsible for the maintenance of the 
website. I am aware that some folks think I’m just off doing that on my own, 
and that’s part of what I’m trying to avoid (see 
https://lists.apache.org/thread/nwvr28gq51c8v0wkqjv8xvvc2xqrtf03 for further 
commentary). I would like to gather a group of people who 1) care about it and 
2) are willing to do some of (NOT ALL) the work.

Specific things that I believe we should tackle include

* Long-term maintenance of the site. This involves regular audits, implementing 
metrics, and perhaps other things
* Reorg - this is a short-term task that I’ve been just doing on my own, which 
ensures it will never get done, and if it did, there may be some disagreement 
about how I did it.
* Deduplication - work closely with MarkPub to figure out the *right* place for 
certain information; work through the policy/best-practice dichotomy and ensure 
that we are *not* duplicating policy docs; Work on content on www.a.o 
 that is closely related to content on community.a.o - which 
one is authoritative? Ensure that we don’t duplicate, contradict, or confuse.

There’s probably more.

I would hope that a WG would have regular checkins (could be email, Slack, 
Google Meet, I really don’t care, as long as everyone is engaging with the 
conversation.)

If you are interested in helping form this group, please speak up in this 
thread, and help us help one another.

— 
Rich Bowen
rbo...@rcbowen.com

[WG: WG] Proposal: Working groups working group

[Rich Bowen]

Proposed: A Working Group to help define Working Groups

No, I’m not suggesting a top-down governance of working groups. What I’m 
suggesting is a group to discuss what a working group looks like and what kind 
of tools and processes we want to put in place to make sure that each WG isn’t 
inventing everything from scratch every time. This also makes it easier for 
folks to get involved in WGs, if they all look similar, and you don’t have to 
relearn everything every time.

Topics would include:

* Where to we want to track WG status? I would propose that we create 
GitHub.com/apache/community for stuff like this, to mirror 
GitHub.com/kubernetes/community, at least in spirit, but would like to discuss 
this with more people
* Define an actual data file (See 
https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/sigs.yaml for a possible 
template) that tracks what WGs exist, who’s involved, what they’re working on. 
Or perhaps this is too heavyweight. Dunno. I just want to make these things 
more discoverable
* Responsibilities. For example, I think a WG should report to the ComDev PMC, 
for visibility, accountability, and to show the board that we’re actually doing 
stuff.
* Membership. Who can be a member of a WG? What’s the connection between WG 
membership and comdev committer status? Do we need a formal WG chair, or is 
that too heavyweight?

I imagine that the WG WG would be short-lived, although anything decided can 
obviously be revisited, and evolve over time.

And nothing here should be construed as “you can only do stuff if you stay 
within these guard rails.” It’s just intended to give more structure to people 
that need more structure. Clearly defining roles and hats can really help 
people get involved when they see a huge tasks and no obvious way that they fit 
into it.

What do y’all think?

— 
Rich Bowen
rbo...@rcbowen.com

[WG: Welcome] Proposal, a Welcome Working Group

[Rich Bowen]

Proposed: A formal working group around how we welcome new folks in a 
consistent and helpful manner.

We get people on this list (and on every dev@ and user@ list at the foundation) 
asking how to get engaged. We almost always give them unhelpful answers, and 
send them off to go figure it out on their own.

The Welcome WG would write documentation, and process, around welcoming these 
new folks, and shepherding them towards engagement. This would include, but not 
be limited to:

* Guiding projects towards the incubator. This includes the “why would you want 
to be at Apache? Why would you *NOT* fit at Apache?” documentation that we 
really don’t have yet.
* Guiding brand-new contributors towards how, and where, to contribute. This 
may include working with some of our more welcoming projects to figure out best 
practice, and our less-welcoming projects to figure out why they are and help 
them fix that.
* Working with second-time contributors to encourage best practice. (See 
https://mikemcquaid.com/stop-mentoring-first-time-contributors/ for thoughts on 
first- vs second-time contributors)
* Crafting boilerplate answers to send to folks who show up asking for help 
getting involved, so that we don’t continue this practice of unhelpful “go 
figure it out on your own” responses.
* Maybe work on some kind of a badging program (See 
https://badges.fedoraproject.org/ if you don’t know what I mean by that) to 
incentivize and gamify community engagement, for reasons that I would love to 
talk much more about, but are beyond the scope of this proposal.

What do y’all think?

— 
Rich Bowen
rbo...@rcbowen.com

Re: [WG: Website] Proposal - Website working group

[Andrew Wetmore]

I would be happy to take part in the website working group

On Wed, Feb 7, 2024 at 12:11 PM Rich Bowen  wrote:

> Proposed: Form a formal Website working group.
>
> (I am aware that I haven’t defined “working group” yet, and I do, in fact,
> intend to propose a Working Groups Working Group which could possibly
> formalize what a working group looks like. I have some ideas, but no desire
> to go define it on my own.)
>
> The Website WG would, obviously, be responsible for the maintenance of the
> website. I am aware that some folks think I’m just off doing that on my
> own, and that’s part of what I’m trying to avoid (see
> https://lists.apache.org/thread/nwvr28gq51c8v0wkqjv8xvvc2xqrtf03 for
> further commentary). I would like to gather a group of people who 1) care
> about it and 2) are willing to do some of (NOT ALL) the work.
>
> Specific things that I believe we should tackle include
>
> * Long-term maintenance of the site. This involves regular audits,
> implementing metrics, and perhaps other things
> * Reorg - this is a short-term task that I’ve been just doing on my own,
> which ensures it will never get done, and if it did, there may be some
> disagreement about how I did it.
> * Deduplication - work closely with MarkPub to figure out the *right*
> place for certain information; work through the policy/best-practice
> dichotomy and ensure that we are *not* duplicating policy docs; Work on
> content on www.a.o  that is closely related to content
> on community.a.o - which one is authoritative? Ensure that we don’t
> duplicate, contradict, or confuse.
>
> There’s probably more.
>
> I would hope that a WG would have regular checkins (could be email, Slack,
> Google Meet, I really don’t care, as long as everyone is engaging with the
> conversation.)
>
> If you are interested in helping form this group, please speak up in this
> thread, and help us help one another.
>
> —
> Rich Bowen
> rbo...@rcbowen.com
>
>
>
>
>

-- 
Andrew Wetmore

Editor, Moose House Publications 
Editor-Writer, The Apache Software Foundation 

Re: [WG: Website] Proposal - Website working group

[Bertrand Delacretaz]

On Wed, Feb 7, 2024 at 5:11 PM Rich Bowen  wrote:
> ...I would hope that a WG would have regular checkins...

I cannot commit to any synchronous work, but...

> If you are interested in helping form this group, please speak up in this 
> thread,
> and help us help one another...

I'm happy to help and be part of this working group.

-Bertrand

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Re: Working groups

[Willem Jiang]

Hi Rich

For ComDev, we are trying to help on the foundation level by providing
the infrastructure or framework for the people to join us, and we also
need to help the project PMC members do their community-building work.
As an OSPOer from ByteDance, I'm doing similar work in the daytime.  I
learned a lot from the ASF projects and incubator, but I needed help
to share all I knew with my colleagues because there were too many
details for them to experience. So, I want to join the workgroup to
gain more use cases and hands-on experience by contributing my
efforts.

Please count me in, and I'm looking forward to working with you :)

Willem Jiang

Twitter: willemjiang
Weibo: 姜宁willem

On Wed, Feb 7, 2024 at 11:53 PM Rich Bowen  wrote:
>
> Hey, friends,
>
> I’m recovering from FOSDEM, and going through my notes. I would like to 
> propose a somewhat unformed idea that I would like to pursue for the next 
> year or so - the idea of forming working groups here in ComDev, to pursue 
> different tasks.
>
> The reasoning for this is that, while I have eleventy million things that I 
> want to accomplish under the umbrella of of ComDev, I have a tendency to just 
> go do stuff myself, because building consensus is *hard*. That leads, 
> consistently, to three outcomes:
>
> • The stuff doesn’t actually get done, because my list is long
> • Nobody else does it either, because that’s Rich’s project
> • I get super frustrated that nobody is helping, even though I created 
> that situation myself, and know that I created it.
>
> This is hugely unproductive, and I would like to see if we can take a step 
> towards making it easier for people to participate in narrowly defined ways 
> that don’t seem quite as daunting as our current way of operating.
>
> A working group would have a topic (“Website” is the first one that I’m 
> likely to propose), a defined scope of work, and regular check-ins where 
> progress is assessed, and narrowly defined action items can be volunteered 
> for.
>
> I love the way Kubernetes tackles this (see 
> https://github.com/kubernetes/community for some of that) but we tend to 
> believe, here at Apache, that this is too heavy on the structure side. I have 
> come to think, over the past few months, that we need more structure, because 
> our “just go jump in and do stuff!!” approach is hugely intimidating to 
> beginners, and is no better than “figure it out yourself, I’m too busy” in 
> terms of trying to engage new contributors.
>
> Now, I know that this email is very fluffy and philosophical. I’ll be 
> proposing a specific WG later this week, as soon as soon as I can write it 
> up, and asking for folks to participate.
>
> More, and more rambling, thoughts on this topic, here: 
> https://drbacchus.com/the-many-hats-of-a-maintainer/ - if you’re interested.
>
> —
> Rich Bowen
> rbo...@rcbowen.com
>
>
>
>

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Re: [WG: Welcome] Proposal, a Welcome Working Group

[Willem Jiang]

Hi Rich,

Thanks for bringing this up; I've been thinking the same thing for a
while. I agree with your points. I'm sharing my thoughts based on what
you suggested.

1. We can use LLM AI tools to answer the user's first question and
help them find the tasks they may be interested in.
2. It could be hard for us to find less-welcoming projects without
actual data support. We may develop some dashboards to help us
identify the community health problem.

Just my two cents ：）

Willem Jiang

Twitter: willemjiang
Weibo: 姜宁willem

On Thu, Feb 8, 2024 at 12:53 AM Rich Bowen  wrote:
>
> Proposed: A formal working group around how we welcome new folks in a 
> consistent and helpful manner.
>
> We get people on this list (and on every dev@ and user@ list at the 
> foundation) asking how to get engaged. We almost always give them unhelpful 
> answers, and send them off to go figure it out on their own.
>
> The Welcome WG would write documentation, and process, around welcoming these 
> new folks, and shepherding them towards engagement. This would include, but 
> not be limited to:
>
> * Guiding projects towards the incubator. This includes the “why would you 
> want to be at Apache? Why would you *NOT* fit at Apache?” documentation that 
> we really don’t have yet.
> * Guiding brand-new contributors towards how, and where, to contribute. This 
> may include working with some of our more welcoming projects to figure out 
> best practice, and our less-welcoming projects to figure out why they are and 
> help them fix that.
> * Working with second-time contributors to encourage best practice. (See 
> https://mikemcquaid.com/stop-mentoring-first-time-contributors/ for thoughts 
> on first- vs second-time contributors)
> * Crafting boilerplate answers to send to folks who show up asking for help 
> getting involved, so that we don’t continue this practice of unhelpful “go 
> figure it out on your own” responses.
> * Maybe work on some kind of a badging program (See 
> https://badges.fedoraproject.org/ if you don’t know what I mean by that) to 
> incentivize and gamify community engagement, for reasons that I would love to 
> talk much more about, but are beyond the scope of this proposal.
>
> What do y’all think?
>
> —
> Rich Bowen
> rbo...@rcbowen.com
>
>
>
>

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Re: Working groups

[Owen Rubel]

Thanks Rich,

Am currently in the middle of a book on API Patterns explaining API Call
Flows, difference between Front Controller vs Reactor Patterns and other
more complex issue in build backends.

If you are needing any help with API dev, drop a line or get in touch.

Owen Rubel
oru...@gmail.com


On Wed, Feb 7, 2024 at 7:53 AM Rich Bowen  wrote:

> Hey, friends,
>
> I’m recovering from FOSDEM, and going through my notes. I would like to
> propose a somewhat unformed idea that I would like to pursue for the next
> year or so - the idea of forming working groups here in ComDev, to pursue
> different tasks.
>
> The reasoning for this is that, while I have eleventy million things that
> I want to accomplish under the umbrella of of ComDev, I have a tendency to
> just go do stuff myself, because building consensus is *hard*. That leads,
> consistently, to three outcomes:
>
> • The stuff doesn’t actually get done, because my list is long
> • Nobody else does it either, because that’s Rich’s project
> • I get super frustrated that nobody is helping, even though I created
> that situation myself, and know that I created it.
>
> This is hugely unproductive, and I would like to see if we can take a step
> towards making it easier for people to participate in narrowly defined ways
> that don’t seem quite as daunting as our current way of operating.
>
> A working group would have a topic (“Website” is the first one that I’m
> likely to propose), a defined scope of work, and regular check-ins where
> progress is assessed, and narrowly defined action items can be volunteered
> for.
>
> I love the way Kubernetes tackles this (see
> https://github.com/kubernetes/community for some of that) but we tend to
> believe, here at Apache, that this is too heavy on the structure side. I
> have come to think, over the past few months, that we need more structure,
> because our “just go jump in and do stuff!!” approach is hugely
> intimidating to beginners, and is no better than “figure it out yourself,
> I’m too busy” in terms of trying to engage new contributors.
>
> Now, I know that this email is very fluffy and philosophical. I’ll be
> proposing a specific WG later this week, as soon as soon as I can write it
> up, and asking for folks to participate.
>
> More, and more rambling, thoughts on this topic, here:
> https://drbacchus.com/the-many-hats-of-a-maintainer/ - if you’re
> interested.
>
> —
> Rich Bowen
> rbo...@rcbowen.com
>
>
>
>
>

Re: [WG: WG] Proposal: Working groups working group

[Nadia Jiang]

Hi Rich,

I strongly agree with your proposal for forming working groups. As a
newcomer to the Apache Community without the technical background, I have
always hoped to have more opportunities to contribute to the ASF beyond
participating in the community building of my own project, but often didn't
know where to start. I believe the formation of working groups can provide
a clear path for more people (like me) wanting to contribute to the ASF
level to engage in some specific tasks, thereby making our community more
vibrant.

And I think the Working Group Working Group (WG WG) is very essential. Much
of its work involves how to build the community (as each WG is acting as a
mini-community in itself). Moreover, I believe the WG WG wouldn't be
short-lived. Initially, it would focus on defining WGs, but later on, it
could dedicate itself to helping various WGs operate more effectively.

I would love to join the WG WG, please count me in. BTW, I've also just
come back from the FOSDEM. That was very inspiring, and I hope to
contribute more to our community.

Regards,
Nadia


--
Nadia Jiang

Twitter: @jiangbonadia
LinkedIn: @nadiajiang


Rich Bowen  于2024年2月8日周四 00:22写道：

> Proposed: A Working Group to help define Working Groups
>
> No, I’m not suggesting a top-down governance of working groups. What I’m
> suggesting is a group to discuss what a working group looks like and what
> kind of tools and processes we want to put in place to make sure that each
> WG isn’t inventing everything from scratch every time. This also makes it
> easier for folks to get involved in WGs, if they all look similar, and you
> don’t have to relearn everything every time.
>
> Topics would include:
>
> * Where to we want to track WG status? I would propose that we create
> GitHub.com/apache/community for stuff like this, to mirror
> GitHub.com/kubernetes/community, at least in spirit, but would like to
> discuss this with more people
> * Define an actual data file (See
> https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/sigs.yaml for a
> possible template) that tracks what WGs exist, who’s involved, what they’re
> working on. Or perhaps this is too heavyweight. Dunno. I just want to make
> these things more discoverable
> * Responsibilities. For example, I think a WG should report to the ComDev
> PMC, for visibility, accountability, and to show the board that we’re
> actually doing stuff.
> * Membership. Who can be a member of a WG? What’s the connection between
> WG membership and comdev committer status? Do we need a formal WG chair, or
> is that too heavyweight?
>
> I imagine that the WG WG would be short-lived, although anything decided
> can obviously be revisited, and evolve over time.
>
> And nothing here should be construed as “you can only do stuff if you stay
> within these guard rails.” It’s just intended to give more structure to
> people that need more structure. Clearly defining roles and hats can really
> help people get involved when they see a huge tasks and no obvious way that
> they fit into it.
>
> What do y’all think?
>
> —
> Rich Bowen
> rbo...@rcbowen.com
>
>