Contributor Board & Matchmaking

[AlexxNica]

Introduction

We're looking for ways of enhancing contributor/maintainer/project interactions and planning a system to connect potential contributors to projects.

Background

At our last meeting (Aug 11, 2022: recording, meeting notes), we started ideating about ways of connecting potential contributors to projects that need them; This issue is for coordinating the necessary efforts to bring those ideas to fruition.

Context & Initial Ideas

The following is a brief overview–and what I hope is a fair representation–of the discussion and ideas from the meeting that led to this effort.

Cathy Zhang (@cathyhongzhang)

• We need a centralized place for potential contributors to know which projects need contributions and know if their skills match. Without this, it can be overwhelming for contributors to find projects and start contributing.
• That centralized place would help motivate contributors to find good projects that match their expectations and skills; otherwise, they can feel lost due to the vast number of projects we have.

Dawn Foster (@geekygirldawn)

• We can get some information from the DevStats project for repository statistics.
• All of our projects are looking for more contributors in various ways, and we have lots of people who would love to contribute but don't know where to start; This is probably a good opportunity for us to start thinking about how we can better match them up.

Carolyn Van Slyck (@carolynvs)

• Potential contributors use the Contributors website to identify projects and resources to assist them through the journey.
• The automated collection process would probably lack a way of knowing the type of skills needed for each project.
• Project maintainers are the ones currently handling this information, using PRs and other ways of updating project status, descriptions, etc.
  • We can get started quickly by integrating with the current process and asking project maintainers to add some extra information (e.g., where they need help).
• CNCF will probably keep some information on the Contributors website up-to-date based on data from the landscape project. (Need to sync with those projects to see where they're heading and how we can collaborate/integrate with them.)

Catherine Paganini (@CathPag)

• Would be nice to have some kind of job board;
  • Looks & feels like something people already know.
  • Would like to have a way of communicating the importance of different types of contributions (e.g., documentation, non-code).
  • A way for people to see what's available and for projects to communicate what would be valuable contributions.
  • Not only code skills! People could set their preferences for multiple types of contribution opportunities (e.g., docs, programming languages, community support)

Noah Abrahams (@qedrakmar)

• The project organization things would be within a non-code project endeavor.
• On the Kubernetes side, Noah's currently trying to bring the non-code contributor project to this TAG.
  • We can collaborate if project maintainers want to present info related to what types of contributions they need since they're already planning on collecting similar data.

Alexandre Nicastro (@AlexxNica)

• We probably need a database of some sort for this (CRM-style?).
• Find a way to coordinate and do some matchmaking of potential contributors to projects based on the contributors' skills and interests.
  • If a potential contributor doesn't have enough experience with open source or lacks some specific skills but has an interest in learning, we can match them to a mentor (we'd have to coordinate that collaboration with the Mentoring WG)
• Have an automated way of tracking contributor/project/maintainer engagement so we can detect projects that may need help.
  • We can collaborate & integrate with the landscape-graph project.
• We can do two types of data collection: manual and automatic.
  • Manual: having a form that project maintainers fill out.
  • Asking which areas they need help (e.g., skills-based, specific problems).
  • Automatic: analyzing the repositories' stats to get insights into potential and arising problems.

Next steps

• [ ] Collect more feedback and ideas
• [ ] Understand and engage stakeholders
• [ ] Define the scope
• [ ] Research existing and related projects
• [ ] Develop a plan
• [ ] Create a roadmap/timeline
  • [ ] Prioritize based on effort & value
  • [ ] Identify subsets to be released early & collect feedback
• [ ] Look for partners & collaborators
• [ ] Deliver!

[parispittman]

Great idea :) We tried this in Kubernetes before and it was not a success. Wanted to share some highlights with you so you can take those into consideration as you build this.

• most maintainers didn't post. for the following reasons -
  • didn't know how to scope a role, document a role (roles that are scoped outside of the maintainer definition like a project manager), unsure of their actual needs to document it/explain it
  • realized they didn't have time to mentor. most of the roles require 1:1 mentoring and we've found that doesn't scale in large projects. we've adopted group mentoring and set up programs for that based on the role but we had to learn that through this job board exercise. https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/mentoring/programs/group-mentoring.md
  • didn't have the support of their day job to do this (goes against the orgs strategy, no time for mentoring, role building, more duties than just approving PRs, etc)
• contributors looking at the board were confused about the word 'jobs' - many assumed that it came with a job at a cloud provider or this was a training/recruiting program where folks could take these roles and then get hired at a company to do upstream full time; didn't understand that it was a volunteer. "oh I thought this was a paid opportunity" we renamed it 'contributor role board' after getting this feedback from a lot of folks.

We've pushed maintainers to do role descriptions as help wanted issues vs having the board. This way folks looking through help wanted can see not just the tasks but the roles and mentoring opportunities.

[nate-double-u]

I think we should consider using the LFX Mentorship platform for this — we may be using it differently than it is currently being used, but it checks a lot of our boxes:

• centralized place for letting contributors know which projects are looking for help
• skills are a part of both the contributor profile and the ‘job’ post
• It’s traceable (history available--‘jobs’ can be reposted if a contributor moves on)
• Can handle both paid and unpaid opportunities (and there may be funding to help with some of the projects that get posted even if we’re not aware of that need just now)
• it’s an existing system — this is a big plus considering our current capacity for building new sites. We could build a new help wanted site, but if we have something that would work, we should consider it even if it isn’t perfectly ideal*
• maintainers are already familiar with it, though this would be a new use case

[CathPag]

Another option would be to mirror the job board, maybe even add a toggle where people can switch between job board and contributor board. The page already exists, and people interested in a job in cloud native might also look into contributing to improve their skills and/or better position themselves in the cloud native market.

[jberkus]

Is jobs.cncf.io something we would have access to? I thought is was a paid service.

To use LFX, we'd need to wait for the next version of LFX Mentorships; what's currently there wouldn't work.

Regardless, it's important to start this in a low-key and minimal-overhead way, rather than moving straight to complicated and/or restrictive tooling. We're going to need to iterate, and this project isn't going to get done next month.

[cathyhongzhang]

I like the name "Contributor Board & Matchmaking".

[devarsh10]

Hey @AlexxNica, I would like to work on this as a newbie. With some DevOps skills. Also, some pratical skills which may help to collect feedbacks, develop a plan & also create timeline.

Please let me know if I may contribute. Regards.

[nate-double-u]

Hi, the CLOTributor project has been started in order to help with this issue:

• https://clotributor.dev/
• https://github.com/cncf/clotributor

It's an open source project, and still in the alpha stage. Any contributions and suggestions are welcome.

[parispittman]

it would be cool to see that page embedded into the contributor site in some way so that folks can go on a journey vs each being standalone

[jberkus]

With the launch of CLOTributor, this goal has been fulfilled.