It's a Small World After All - Community Relations

[remear]

There's been chatter in IRC lately over how to further increase the commUNITY and collaboration for work on product issues. This issue is for exploring ideas to achieve this goal. Balanced is an open company and as such welcomes contributions from any and all who are interested.

What might facilitate the following:

• Getting people to complete their first pull request to balanced project
• Tag-teaming work on issues
• Retention and access of collaborations for reference
• Making contributing fun and interesting
• Encouraging more openness

[remear]

Achievements and contribution recognition and statistics often bring a level of enjoyment. Badges, points, something like that. Also, perhaps a contributions page with drill-downs on a per user basis with statistics.

Google hangouts have been suggested as a simple means to gather together to work on issues or even just to get to better know each other. It would be great to screen record such sessions and produce some video backlog of them. This can also lead to throwback Fridays or other such nostalgic events.

[remear]

Possibly back achievements and recognition with swag...

[mahmoudimus]

+1 - this is a great idea. Essentially, we want to have a streamlined process for community engagement. How can we make this happen?

[mahmoudimus]

How about:

• Every open balanced project have a CONTRIBUTING.md that demonstrates how to setup an environment and the path to contributing.
• Every open balanced project has an ordered and prioritized issues protocol ranging from:
  • easy
  • difficult
  • internal_fix_required
• Archived and recorded planning meetings
• Balanced producing special t-shirts, clothing patches, swag, etc as awards for contributions and starts introducing tiered contribution levels
• Balanced also starts making leaderboards

[mahmoudimus]

• We also need coding styles for our main languages: Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, C#, and node.js

[ianserlin]

You need a core and a talk mailing list for announcements, a fork me on github badge on the docs site and an official nodejs client. ;)

[remear]

What would a mailing list provide over IRC? I have a few ideas but would like to hear more on why you'd like them.

[mjallday]

I'd like to tag on to this - a way for experienced Balanced integrators to be certified so that it's easy for people who need an integration to hook up with a reputable dev.

[remear]

+1 for balanced integrator certifications. Fantastic idea.

[ianserlin]

Well, typically companies use mailing lists to archive topical discussions across a long period of time, unlike irc, like github, but without having to sign up for github and sort though what's a new feature discussion vs 30 notifications about a bug update.

You can also put a sign up box on your website so people can easily opt in directly and you can send them announcements like, "awesome customers feature is now available!" without them having to be on irc when you say it, search irc history later, or you having to create a new github issue just for the announcement.

I might care about major milestones but not bug reports, right? ...

On Monday, May 6, 2013, Ben Mills wrote:

+1 for balanced integrator certifications. Fantastic idea.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/309#issuecomment-17492822 .

---

Ian Serlin ian@ianserlin.com 415-754-9563 http://twitter.com/spiceninja http://www.linkedin.com/in/ianserlin

[pavel-i-am]

Here's the scenario that I'm in now. I've stumbled upon this project willing to start from contributing to it for a while, probably with plans to make it my main work in some time. Apart from IRC there is really no good way of contacting any of you. Also, on your website, (balancedpayments.com) there is not much information regarding contributions. But ok, I got this far. Where do I begin? I'm not familiar with payment systems. I however see many github repositories with multiple issues. Besides programming language knowledge I would really like to know what else must be known before starting to contribute to the code by resolving the issues. I'm finishing python3 port of balanced-python right now. There wasn't such a task, it is just interesting.

[pavel-i-am]

What I would suggest in oder to make this much simpler for beginning contributors is the following: a portal, for example 'contribute.balancedpayments.com' or 'balancedpayments.com/contribute' where you would give the following information: what to begin with if someone sees the project for the first time; where to go from that point taking into account the skills that particular contributor has (e.g python, nodejs, etc.) and it would also be extremely nice to know where help is really necessary without having to go over all your repositories looking at issues.

[remear]

https://github.com/balanced/www.balancedpayments.com/issues/16

[steveklabnik]

I am, of course, very interested in this. :smile: