KF5 Volunteer day 1: Done

[Matt Williams]

On 23 February 2012 14:52, Kevin Ottens <ervin at kde.org> wrote:
> 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?

While I have been involved in KDE since 6 years now, I've been away
recently due to real life constraints. Nonetheless, I wanted to begin
helping out with kdelibs/frameworks and so this volunteer day was
really useful. Being able to begin with something as simple as porting
some KDE usage to Qt equivalents really gave me chance to get to know
the code base a little better while making a difference. I think tasks
at this level are perfect for newbies to frameworks like myself. In
the time since the weekend David has been helping me out via email
with various questions I've had (thanks!) which is useful since I
don't always have time to sit on IRC.

> 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?

I think there's two sides to this:
1) Having a list of JJ-type tasks for people to start getting involved
with which people can claim on the Wiki
2) Having mentors in the channel to help people out and answer questions

Keeping the former going throughout the week with tasks but does
require monitoring and maintenance by frameworks maintainers. On the
other hand, if there's always tasks available there then we don't need
constant volunteer days with mentors available for 8 hours straight. I
would say perhaps bi-weekly would be best (not using up too much of
mentors' time while keeping the momentum going).

-- 
Matt Williams
http://milliams.com