KF5 Volunteer day 1: Done

[Kevin Ottens]

Hello,

I bit overdue but I've been very busy catching up with sleep lately... So here 
is finally my short report on the first volunteer day attempt. There will be a 
couple of open questions in there, opinions are most welcome.

Saturday 18th February 9am:
Just woke up, breakfast, got to my computer, and IRC here I come.

Admittedly I didn't expect many people to show up early... But at 10am sharp I 
was getting the first requests! Aaron showed up soon after that helping me 
keep the things on track (thanks a lot for showing up *that* early I know how 
much mornings pain you!).

The lack of build system grand masters was telling though. I think we should 
really aim at having either Alex or Steve available the next time.

In grand total we had five persons asking for help. I admit being surprised 
about the seniority of those people, most of them were not long timers. That 
said they were all motivated so that's cool. :-)

Out of those five, two decided to try themselves at splitting some frameworks 
out of kdeui, and somewhat unsurprisingly they've been struggling with it. So 
far I didn't see their changes for those split get into the branch which 
concerns me a tiny bit: are they about to give up in disgust? If that's the 
case then we probably failed at giving a task of the right difficulty to 
someone.

All those who picked the smaller kdelibs cleanup tasks did better overall. 
They either completed during the days, or I've seen commits later on this week 
to complete the thing. It seems to be easier to get committed people that way.

So I'd say for later editions: except if that's already someone for which 
we're sure the skill set is correct for a split propose a cleanup task 
instead. After a couple of cleanups maybe they can pick up a splitting task 
but that's probably too much to chew on a first try if you have no experience 
whatsoever dealing with kdelibs. It's a bit filtering on reputation which I 
don't like, but I'd rather do that than turning people away in disgust. Any 
opinion there?

Also, I think it was worth it to have such a session at two levels:
 1) Indeed shows people they can help, and some turned up to try themselves on 
frameworks, definitely needed;
 2) For people already involved, that forces us to block a day on frameworks 
and we can make nice progress (like Aaron spontaneously taking on 
kwindowsystem, or myself tidying up more of the wiki... I'm doomed to not code 
these days).

So we should definitely keep doing those, the real question is when? Should it 
be weekly? bi-monthly? monthly?

It seems to be "the more the better" but I doubt we can get enough people to 
be available every week. I definitely can't be there for all of them, that 
said not everyone needs to be there, two or three people to be mentors are 
enough, so we can probably have some rotations. Opinions? I'd definitely 
welcome any creative solution allowing to have these events very regularly.

Regards.
-- 
Kévin Ottens, http://ervin.ipsquad.net

KDAB - proud patron of KDE, http://www.kdab.com
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