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We started thinking about community and contribution and ownership and funding before we wrote any code or before we had any of the technical demos that we had early on. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[15:57\] That was great. We're getting ready for a break now... When we come back, Jan's gonna talk a little bit about the relationship between healthy and popular open source projects. |
**Break:** \[16:08\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay, we're back from the break, and we're gonna hand it over to Nadia to get into some of the popular and healthy and sustainability topics that she's so passionate about. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, I'm kind of curious to have this be a little bit of an informal chat between us around some of the different topics that have come up around building healthy communities. I think I actually got this language from you, Mikeal, around popular versus healthy projects. Or at least the topic of healt... |
One of the tensions that I see in building healthy communities is, well, what happens if a project is being used by tons of people but it's not healthy, whatever that definition is? Do they have any incentive to change? Is it necessary that a project is healthy in order to thrive? So maybe just starting by talking a li... |
For me, a popular project is one that's being used by a ton of people, or a ton of people depend on it, and a healthy project is one that has a lot of great processes and positive culture around good governance. People understand how to join, how to contribute, people feel valued for their contributions. Does anyone ha... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think if you're looking for a metric, you could probably define it as some kind of ratio between the number of people contributing to it in some meaningful way, and the number of people using it. If that gets too off balance and there's a lot of people depending on it and nobody working on it, it g... |
Hoodie has an amazing number of people engaged in it and people are definitely using it, but I think it probably has the highest ratio of contributors to users that I know. |
**Jan Lehnardt:** At this point yeah. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I'm curious what you've done there... You're converting users into meaningful contributors at an astonishing rate, and I'd like to hear some of your thoughts about that and what you've done. |
**Jan Lehnardt:** Probably not actually converting users into contributors, but recruiting contributors specifically and then targeting first-time contributors or people who haven't coded, haven't been doing a lot of programming in the past, or haven't programmed in an open source context before. So when we're targetti... |
\[19:36\] Hoodie is kind of close to 1.0 and has been for a while. The last major rewrite coincided with a complete restructuring of the project to make it more accessible for new contributors, because we realized we could build that 1.0 that we've all dreamed of, but it's gonna take us three years, and we'd rather hav... |
Then we started documenting it. We have a policy on GitHub, every subdirectory needs a readme. You have to explain, like "This is the test directory. This is what we use for testing libraries. Here's an example of how to do a test." Other subdirectories explain how the particular components of the software work, and ar... |
Then the third thing we've done is specifically curating beginner issues; going out of our way to explain... A lot of open source projects on GitHub make use of the fact that a lot of open source developers understand how GitHub works, but a lot of people don't. Even if they're programmers, they're just not used to the... |
We make beginner issues that explain how to make a pull request as part of the issue; it's just linked into the common documentation from other nice people in the community. Then we make step-by-step guides for just how to fix a typo on the website. While that might sound like a bit of overkill, if you do that a bunch ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, there's a lot of similar things to it that we've done in the reforms to the NodeJS project as well. If you just look at it from a number standpoint, there's not a lot of new full-time open source contributors that are coming into open source, but there's an insane amount of people coming in to ... |
You have this spectrum of contributors that really engage people to help out all of the newcomers that's all of the former newcomers, right? |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm really curious about this for the both of you - people talk about the contributor funnel, which is sort of like "How do you get someone who fixed a typo on the website to become a dedicated member of the team?" I think there's a lot of... I don't really fully understand it, and there's a lot of co... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think there's two ways to approach this, and one of them will surely fail, and that is like "I'm a full-time contributor to this project, I've been maintaining it for a while. How do I make more people like me, and how do I get people to where I am?" That never works, ever. It never has worked. |
What you have to do is you have to say, "Oh, there's all these people that I need to be contributors. How do I meet them where they are, and sort of bring them into the project?" And in terms of retention, I think that you do have to be okay with some of these people not sticking around, but enough of them will. And th... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[24:02\] So do you think it's not really realistic or possible... I'll hear some maintainers talk about mentoring one person to bring them on and get them to be this serious contributor to the project, and bring them on the core team. And I've heard some frustrations in that when it doesn't work out,... |
**Jan Lehnardt:** There's this joke about the CFO asking the CEO, "What happens if we invest in our people and they leave?" and the CEO replies, "What if we don't and they stay?" \[laughter\] I think investing in people is always worth it. We have very tangible examples of this. We have people who have basically switch... |
They're relating their experience, and other people also want to have that experience and also come here. They're like, "Hey, you did really nice things for that person. How can I be part of this?" And it's always worth it, even though sometimes that interest doesn't go anywhere. It's just something that you have to be... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think 'mentorship' is a really loaded word, too. We're all very pro-mentorship, but I think there's two ways to do that. One is to have mentorship be kind of a core value, like you're always trying to help people level up. But often times I see a group of people that maintain a project have a proce... |
All of these things that Jan talked about, like documenting all of this stuff, that doesn't help people that already know it, it helps people that don't know it. You have to prioritize that, right? |
**Jan Lehnardt:** Yeah. It was a radical transformation for Hoodie itself, as well as for the project - adopting these things and, like you said, meeting people where they are, as opposed to getting them to where we are. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I'm also interested, you mentioned that you broke things up into a lot of smaller components and that that really helped. We did this in NodeJS too, where we... You know, the website repository is where a lot of people get their feet wet, and it's so different from contributing to the core, but we ac... |
**Jan Lehnardt:** Yeah, that's exactly my history with PHP. I was studying English to German documentation translations, and I filled out missing bits in the English translations, then I built features that weren't documented... I started building features and documenting them, and got further and further in, because I... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** What are some of those repositories that you see a lot of that happening in now in Hoodie, and in other projects that you're involved in? |
**Jan Lehnardt:** We have a dedicated editorial project for Hoodie, a separate repository. I've put out a job ad for an editorial team that would take care of our blog and Twitter, and schedule posts and collaborate on reviewing things and have an interview series. There are lots of stuff that you can do on the blog, r... |
\[28:14\] We kind of modeled after NodeJS. They branched out into other areas, of education, design, we have dedicated teams that have their own culture of dealing with things. Then the code team is just another part of the project, as opposed to how it's usually - there's the code team of the project, and everyone els... |
For Couch we started experimenting with a marketing team a couple years ago, and it was a huge success as well. There were very similar obligations with what the Hoodie editorial team does, but it actually does also do proper marketing, speaking with industry analysts, doing phone calls with them, that kind of stuff, b... |
I can only recommend this. You get to meet a lot of fun people that are being very passionate about stuff. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm wondering about playing devil's advocate in a couple different situations... Do you think that having tons of casual contributors or drive-by contributors - if you had all that and people weren't really sticking around to become regular long-time contributors, would you call that project healthy, ... |
**Jan Lehnardt:** It's tricky to say. When we mentioned the funnel, what it definitely suffers from... We have a lot of first-time contributor issues, but we don't have second-timer issues, or the third time. We don't have a very well-defined documented funnel for people to follow. It's something that we definitely wan... |
I don't wanna nail people on a metric for being healthy or unhealthy. Every open source project has its own kind of... Depending on the scope and what it wants to do at some point maybe it's done, it needs to switch into maintenance mode, so it actually doesn't need a healthy community by the metrics of another project... |
There are other people running their own successful open source projects that are completely contrary to everything that we've been talking about, and they're still nice projects and nice people. I don't wanna say these are wrong because they use their own metrics, or something. I just wanna be careful and not stay tha... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I'll be a little bit more aggressive about that. \[laughter\] |
**Jan Lehnardt:** Alright, go! |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I do think that if people are showing up and wanna contribute in any way, and you're not accepting those or you don't have a policy to accept them, or you don't have the people, that is gonna burn out your community at some point in time, and things are gonna start to shift negatively towards the pro... |
I do agree that I wouldn't hold to any particular metric, because there are a few projects that I can think of that have a ton of casual contributors coming, have a single maintainer who's really nice and really encourages the stuff, and is fine with the maintenance burden of actually doing all of that stuff. Lodash is... |
**Jan Lehnardt:** He also is being paid to do this, which is maybe one of the angles of how... It's like, "Why can some people afford this and some not" |
**Mikeal Rogers:** He was doing it before he was paid to do it. And also I think his job pays him to do other stuff as well, it's not his only job. But he's also not complaining about drive-by contributors, he's not complaining about the maintenance overhead. If you're gonna complain about the maintenance overhead of c... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[31:58\] It makes me wonder why does this stuff matter to a project? Because Jan, you're certainly being careful to say not every project is like this, and that's okay. At the same time, I see Hoodie as like "Wow, this is a really strong example of why this stuff matters." But does it not matter in c... |
**Jan Lehnardt:** It's probably based on what they want to achieve, and if they achieve all that they want, that's kind of great, but they're kind of closed to other ideas in the project. |
One of the success stories of Hoodie is turning someone who literally just fixed a typo on the website and then became basically our accessibility person, to make sure that all our websites and the example projects are accessible by default. They've since moved to other things in the project, but has brought into the p... |
If you don't have a project that has a regular influx of more people of more diverse backgrounds, you're kind of missing out on these new things where a project could be taken. Sometimes that's okay, but that's also an opportunity missed, and I kind of don't like those. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I would also say that if the project's usage is growing, you need to grow the contributors. If you have enough money to continue hiring, then that will work out. What I see really often is people get hired to maintain a project at a particular level of popularity, and when it doubles or triples, they... |
There was a point in time where Joyent employing Ryan Dahl was enough for Node. We didn't really need any other full-time people, and that was fine. But the project grew so much... No company could keep up with hiring people to stay on the project, and we really needed to find a way to bring more contributors in. |
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