Healthy Open Source Projects

rmehta · May 23, 2017, 6:17am

Community,

This is a good post on open source projects. I guess right now we are “unhealthy” because there are many users asking too many things and not enough contributors and committers. The good part is that the number of contributors is slowly increasing. With the foundation pitching in and the community volunteering for answering queries and issues hopefully things will become better.

But we still need to drive more contributors to the project, to make it a “healthy” one!

revant_one · May 23, 2017, 12:53pm

Reference for a theme-based, open structure

github.com

YunoHost/project-organization/blob/master/yunohost_project_organization.md

# Goal of this document

This document aims at describing the structure and the way the collective works to make development and maintenance of YunoHost possible.
More specifically, in line with the values of the project, it is important to:

- maintain transparency on the functioning of the collective and the values of the project
- explain the open nature of the project, so that outsiders feel entitled to contribute to the project, by joining or not joining the collective
- enable the members of the collective to feel legitimate to discuss, contribute and act on decisions
- make the project sustainable, by sharing knowledge and responsibilities, by limiting the “bus factor”
- limit power asymmetries
- have a formal decision-making mechanism, e.g. to resolve a conflict, or to develop the collective or the project

# Goal of the YunoHost project

In a context where the evolution of technological tools lead to major societal challenges, YunoHost advocates an Internet that is decentralised and that allows people to remain in control of their data and their digital tools. One of the tenets of such an Internet is to drastically simplify, make accessible and to democratise server administration, when this is traditionnaly reserved to a technical elite.

As such, the goal of the YunoHost project is to build an operating system and all the necessary tools to install and administer, autonomously and without too many technical skills, a server and digital services in a private context (family, group of friends…) or collective (non profit, company, school…).

The YunoHost collective is close to other like-minded collectives, such as FFDN, Framasoft, CHATONS, or La Quadrature du Net. The collective is also sensitive to ecological issues and inclusivity.

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JayRam · May 23, 2017, 1:32pm

I looked at the ByLaws of a few of the Open Source projects. The GNOME project confers voting rights based on contributions. I think that’s a good model to emulate for us at some stage.

Thanks

Jay

James_Robertson · May 24, 2017, 6:55pm

I have been working on and off with open source projects for close to 20 years now. I have seen some great ones and some doosies. I really like this article from Node.js on how they do things. I like the transparent/open model that they employ. I also like the concepts around reducing fences and other bureaucracy that can impede improvements.

I am really glad to see the foundation working through these things for long term improvements.

I have a comment about “contributors”. Not all of us know how to code (me included). While I cannot improve the actual code base, I have already spent a good amount of time labeling issues and helping on the forum. These are also contributions and I hope they count for something. While I am a small business owner now, my background is corporate IT operations and security. So I do have experience in hosting and managing complex platforms. I hope that my contributions in this area are also viewed positively.

So in that vein, I am a contributor, just not a code one. I do like the Node.js idea of lots of smaller repositories. I have suggested in another forum conversation that pulling the documentation out to its own repo might be a good idea. I feel comfortable updating markdown files and screen shots. Just not python code.

I also really like how the foundation is moving to a voting system of some kind. Look forward to seeing how that plays out as well.

mulyadi-agtechsg · May 24, 2017, 8:28pm

@jayram

I think at the moment, the project have many contributors (due to the number of issues raised) but short of committers, reviewers and validators.

How do we incentivize them? A form of official recognition and influence would be good to start with.

Hope the Foundation can set the foundation of ERPNext strong with feedbacks from its members and resources available.