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I was commenting to a colleague the other day how amazed I was at the sheer quantity of github "issues" that I was seeing posted to a few popular open source re

by nkw 10y ago

I was commenting to a colleague the other day how amazed I was at the sheer quantity of github "issues" that I was seeing posted to a few popular open source repositories that were rants about why feature X wasn't available yet or a priority yet, or demanding that someone walk them through some installation issue because the poster couldn't understand (or didn't read) the README. None of the people that posted this stuff appeared to have ever contributed to that project (or any project), but thought they were entitled to what were essentially support requests or re-tasking of developers to meet their demanded schedule. Our discussion eventually thought it was due to two things: 1) Github, while making the open source process visible and easy to use for many, also makes the process pretty open and barrier free to people who may not yet have the technical (or social) ability to meaningfully contribute to a project; what once would have required posting to a dev mailing list is now just a couple of clicks; and 2) a cultural mindset that some people seem to have that free or open source software is some kind of entitlement (or at least due to communication issues, and the ambiguity of the written word on the Internet that is how I thought it came off). I think the sheer volume of freely available amazing software has caused some to forget the whole reason we have this stuff is someone somewhere spent a lot of time working on it and then decided to give it away. I don't know if this is really a javascript thing, but I think it manifests itself there more than others simply because javascript might be the first place a lot of people start in their career/learning.

detaro 10y ago
regarding your first point: often there doesn't seem to be a dedicated support channel/community. Mailing lists are less and less popular, if one exists its web interface is likely a long way behind GitHub. There are no forums. Some languages have project-independent channels (e.g. message boards for python users will try to help you with whatever library you're messing with right now), but they don't exist for all ecosystems and are shrinking. Stack Overflow has a low tolerance to badly asked questions and a reputation for it (and probably killed the message boards that dealt with them before). Initially, it makes sense that questions go to Github (public, no extra infrastructure needed, no community yet), but at some point they have to be moved. Even a %project-questions repository might help, if enough non-core-devs take care of it. EDIT: to add to the last point: if a core contributor has to click the "close issue" button on a question that's a problem. Either give community members the power to do so (at least some are going to feel honored by that, a great motivation), or push questions to a channel that doesn't have that notion.
- moosingin3space 10y ago
  Project Q&A sites, subreddits, and IRC channels are a pretty good solution to this (based on my experience with Rust for the latter two), as at least it separates "support" from "issues". Doesn't fix toxicity, that requires consistent and effective moderation, another thing Rust does well.
  - gabeio 10y ago
    I agree subreddits and IRC, can be moderated by users who don't need to directly have repo access, sort of an abstraction, unlike how github repo members/collaborators would, can be a huge assist to eliminating that toxicity. It even has the potential to be handled before the negativity ever gets to those who have so much going for the project, unlike github issues currently which really require the collaborators who have usually contributed a lot to the project, to directly mitigate the toxicity there. I think it would be a great asset if github added the ability to give certain collaborators access to issues only which might aid in fixing this issue allowing there to be sort of moderators/support users who love the project but maybe are better at giving back by moderating issues more than contributing code.
    - moosingin3space 10y ago
      Sort of like gitlab's Reporter role? Also, the biggest problem with IRC/subreddits with a dedicated community team is that it takes a long time for many projects to reach the point where this is feasible. Rust is large enough it's fine, but many small projects (like what's common in the JS community) will never get enough people to dedicate some of them to "community management".
      - gabeio 10y ago
        I think so I haven't used gitlab enough. Yeah libraries do need to become large enough but I think angular2 is ~19k stars & 2k watchers which is more than expressjs/express watchers but less stars, but it depends because I do sort of this role with expressjs/session which is pretty small 1-2k stars I try to help with what issues I know how to and to get all the information from the users to help debug. We have only had one issue (that I know of) of users negatively critiquing the library.
mi100hael 10y ago
I agree 100%. GitHub muddles the contribution process and support process. Couple that with the irony of developing free software using a bunch of proprietary, commercial tools, and I much prefer the tried & true IRC/mailing list approach to the trendy Slack/GitHub stack. I think a large part of the problem is that the current generation of new developers is completely conditioned by Facebook, Google, Dropbox, etc to relinquish control of their data rather than deal with the slightest inconvenience of configuring an IRC client or whatever else it may be.
- petetnt 10y ago
  Creating barriers or deliberately keeping them up is never the solution. Every time you create more obstacles, you'll end up losing a future contributor or two. Contributors that might end up solving larger future problems or ones that end up owning the whole project after you have moved on. It's not about the slightest inconvenience and obviously you might get slightly larger signal-to-noise ratio but when was the last time keeping into your own small bubble paid off? Most likely never. At the Brackets project (https://github.com/adobe/brackets https://github.com/adobe/brackets) we have seen lots of new active contributors that started from none to giving steady stream of PRs and the effort needed for that was just a slight push to the right direction.
- matt4077 10y ago
  I'm sorry, but having lived in the times where sourceforge was the old github, this strikes me as quire absurd. Firstly: sourceforge was widely used and was also hosted – the architecture didn't really change. Secondly: Github is simply the best thing that ever happened to OSS. It's a fantastic interface that allows you to: - Immediately get a sense of the project: You know where to look and can quickly scan Stars, Issues, Checkins etc. - Makes contributing a no-brainer: I never ever sent anyone a patch by email. With GH, it's basically more difficult NOT to contribute back. - Makes forking easy: OSS projects often stagnate. Now, someone can fork the project, maybe update the dependencies and get it running again in half an hour or so. There's a graph right there showing you all the forks, so it's easy to figure out which one you want to trust. - Makes discovery easy. I check the trending repositories every few days, and there's no better way to learn than to get lost reading other peoples' code. - The whole industry of CI platforms etc. being given out for free to OSS projects was created around Github. So I'm quite happy people are happy to "relinquish control of their data", considering I don't even know what that's supposed to mean in the context of OSS.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
65827 10y ago
Yeah clearly if we just get a little bit more elitism and condescension in the software communities of the world the problems will go away!

by nkw 10y ago

detaro 10y ago

regarding your first point: often there doesn't seem to be a dedicated support channel/community. Mailing lists are less and less popular, if one exists its web interface is likely a long way behind GitHub. There are no forums. Some languages have project-independent channels (e.g. message boards for python users will try to help you with whatever library you're messing with right now), but they don't exist for all ecosystems and are shrinking. Stack Overflow has a low tolerance to badly asked questions and a reputation for it (and probably killed the message boards that dealt with them before). Initially, it makes sense that questions go to Github (public, no extra infrastructure needed, no community yet), but at some point they have to be moved. Even a %project-questions repository might help, if enough non-core-devs take care of it. EDIT: to add to the last point: if a core contributor has to click the "close issue" button on a question that's a problem. Either give community members the power to do so (at least some are going to feel honored by that, a great motivation), or push questions to a channel that doesn't have that notion.

moosingin3space 10y ago
Project Q&A sites, subreddits, and IRC channels are a pretty good solution to this (based on my experience with Rust for the latter two), as at least it separates "support" from "issues". Doesn't fix toxicity, that requires consistent and effective moderation, another thing Rust does well.
- gabeio 10y ago
  I agree subreddits and IRC, can be moderated by users who don't need to directly have repo access, sort of an abstraction, unlike how github repo members/collaborators would, can be a huge assist to eliminating that toxicity. It even has the potential to be handled before the negativity ever gets to those who have so much going for the project, unlike github issues currently which really require the collaborators who have usually contributed a lot to the project, to directly mitigate the toxicity there. I think it would be a great asset if github added the ability to give certain collaborators access to issues only which might aid in fixing this issue allowing there to be sort of moderators/support users who love the project but maybe are better at giving back by moderating issues more than contributing code.
  - moosingin3space 10y ago
    Sort of like gitlab's Reporter role? Also, the biggest problem with IRC/subreddits with a dedicated community team is that it takes a long time for many projects to reach the point where this is feasible. Rust is large enough it's fine, but many small projects (like what's common in the JS community) will never get enough people to dedicate some of them to "community management".
    - gabeio 10y ago
      I think so I haven't used gitlab enough. Yeah libraries do need to become large enough but I think angular2 is ~19k stars & 2k watchers which is more than expressjs/express watchers but less stars, but it depends because I do sort of this role with expressjs/session which is pretty small 1-2k stars I try to help with what issues I know how to and to get all the information from the users to help debug. We have only had one issue (that I know of) of users negatively critiquing the library.

mi100hael 10y ago

I agree 100%. GitHub muddles the contribution process and support process. Couple that with the irony of developing free software using a bunch of proprietary, commercial tools, and I much prefer the tried & true IRC/mailing list approach to the trendy Slack/GitHub stack. I think a large part of the problem is that the current generation of new developers is completely conditioned by Facebook, Google, Dropbox, etc to relinquish control of their data rather than deal with the slightest inconvenience of configuring an IRC client or whatever else it may be.

petetnt 10y ago
Creating barriers or deliberately keeping them up is never the solution. Every time you create more obstacles, you'll end up losing a future contributor or two. Contributors that might end up solving larger future problems or ones that end up owning the whole project after you have moved on. It's not about the slightest inconvenience and obviously you might get slightly larger signal-to-noise ratio but when was the last time keeping into your own small bubble paid off? Most likely never. At the Brackets project (https://github.com/adobe/brackets https://github.com/adobe/brackets) we have seen lots of new active contributors that started from none to giving steady stream of PRs and the effort needed for that was just a slight push to the right direction.
matt4077 10y ago
I'm sorry, but having lived in the times where sourceforge was the old github, this strikes me as quire absurd. Firstly: sourceforge was widely used and was also hosted – the architecture didn't really change. Secondly: Github is simply the best thing that ever happened to OSS. It's a fantastic interface that allows you to: - Immediately get a sense of the project: You know where to look and can quickly scan Stars, Issues, Checkins etc. - Makes contributing a no-brainer: I never ever sent anyone a patch by email. With GH, it's basically more difficult NOT to contribute back. - Makes forking easy: OSS projects often stagnate. Now, someone can fork the project, maybe update the dependencies and get it running again in half an hour or so. There's a graph right there showing you all the forks, so it's easy to figure out which one you want to trust. - Makes discovery easy. I check the trending repositories every few days, and there's no better way to learn than to get lost reading other peoples' code. - The whole industry of CI platforms etc. being given out for free to OSS projects was created around Github. So I'm quite happy people are happy to "relinquish control of their data", considering I don't even know what that's supposed to mean in the context of OSS.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

65827 10y ago

Yeah clearly if we just get a little bit more elitism and condescension in the software communities of the world the problems will go away!