Clarify and make more prominent the role of the RubyGems partnership

[practicingdev]

One specific issue I've heard echoed from the community is the importance of making it clear what the funding situation is for RubyGems hosting.

To test public perception, I ran a Twitter poll on this a few days ago, and the results are shown in the screenshot below:

It's not surprising that half of people don't know offhand who is responsible for paying for hosting, although it'd be great if that number was lower. It is somewhat concerning that of the remaining people who responded, ~3 out of 10 assume RubyTogether is responsible for hosting fees.

Looking around and trying to find the information as a casual visitor might, I was able to find the RubyGems partnership page, which is linked from the "What about Ruby Central" section down in the RubyTogether's FAQ.

This is useful, and a good start! https://rubytogether.org/rubygems

I am not sure if the language there has been reviewed by Ruby Central. If so, great! If not, I'd like to suggest having them do so and then making sure to coordinate whenever this page is updated.

But when we go to Rubygems.org itself (which is where most people will end up when just using Ruby rather than specifically looking up RubyTogether), we see this:

As a visitor, seeing no mention of Ruby Central here, nor the RubyGems partnership, I could totally understand why people would assume RubyTogether was the primary steward who was responsible for covering hosting fees.

Ruby Central is listed on the sponsors page, but not in this attribution.

I'd like to suggest rewriting this copy on RubyGems.org to make it clear that RubyGems is supported via the Rubygems Partnership, and then explicitly linking to that page. You can have an additional paragraph about contributing to RubyTogether, since Ruby Central isn't really actively soliciting donations, but it should be made super clear that these two things are overlapping but not equivalent to one another.

It might be even more helpful to make the partnership page a whole lot more detailed, explaining the whole end-to-end story about who is paying for what.

(Note: I'm speaking only for myself based on what I've seen expressed as a concern, I'm not affiliated w. Ruby Central. But I do think just from the perspective of the Ruby community member, they need to know who is responsible for paying the bills for the things they rely on day-to-day)

[adarsh]

This is great - thank you for raising this and adding such detail. 👍

I'm listing the places where, once we agree on some new copy, we should make pull requests:

rubygems.org site

• https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems.org/blob/d30caaa4d36998c5cc003b8792918892672ebaa7/app/views/layouts/application.html.erb#L159-L167
• https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems.org/blob/3e2903c30ab05dbed51c70a0a458751600b50fb0/app/views/pages/sponsors.html.erb#L4-L30
• https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems.org/blob/3ffa90e28f41775350d7c069bea70fed7091f323/README.md

rubytogether.org site

• https://rubytogether.org/rubygems How do we even get to this page? Maybe some information design required (https://github.com/rubytogether/rubytogether.org/blob/d264f8bd313f1efd4f85cdeefb929ed86d180119/app/views/home/rubygems.html.erb)
• https://github.com/rubytogether/rubytogether.org/blob/d264f8bd313f1efd4f85cdeefb929ed86d180119/app/views/home/_faq.html.erb

[shushugah]

Ruby Gems published one blog about its relation to Ruby Together and Ruby Central

No one in the Ruby community should worry about the availability or security of RubyGems being connected in any way to the fundraising of Ruby Together. Funds raised by Ruby Together go primarily towards paying developers to add features and fix bugs. Ruby Central, on the other hand, is wholly responsible for the operations and baseline stability of the system. While these two efforts go hand-in-hand, it’s vitally important to understand that they are two different things. Ruby Together’s requests for donations do not mean that there is any reason for concern about RubyGems’ continued existence or operation.

https://blog.rubygems.org/2017/03/15/rubygems-funding.html

[practicingdev]

@adarsh Those look like great places to start! Thanks for looking into this.

[qrush]

Copying this from the RubyTogether slack. I feel there's 4 places that should have this situation spelled out:

1) rubytogether.org 2) rubycentral.org 3) rubygems.org 4) rubygems.org readme

[adarsh]

How about this for a draft?

The RubyGems.org service is provided by an alliance between Ruby Central, Ruby Together, and Fastly. Ruby Central pays for the AWS bill, Ruby Together pays for dev and ops work, and Fastly comps all bandwidth and CDN usage (How much is this worth?).

Each month, Ruby Central contributes about $4,000, Ruby Together contributes about $4,000, and Fastly contributes about 530 terabytes of transfer capacity.

Who are the right people to edit/update this copy? /cc @qrush @indirect @evanphx @ezkl

[danielcompton]

Each month, Ruby Central contributes about $4,000 in hosting costs, Ruby Together contributes about $4,000 in contractor payments, and Fastly contributes about 530 terabytes of transfer capacity (~$50,000 value).

What about this for the second paragraph? This makes it really clear what the money from each party is going towards, and also highlights Fastly's extremely generous support (I had no idea how much that was until I did the math). I did those calcs at a blended bandwidth rate of $0.10/GB. Not sure what your traffic breakdown is, but I think this would be roughly the ballpark figures?

[evanphx]

I am not in favor of putting dollar values on these. They are fairly volitile, with the RT share being the most so as it’s been $0 some months as it’s need based only.

I’d much rather just be explicit about what each group provides. Additionally, RT does not solely provide administration of RG.O as I also do that work.

[evanphx]

What is the “RubyGems Partnership”? I’ve never heard of this as an explicit thing and frankly I’d be the one that would be a partner.

[evanphx]

The reason Ruby Central is not mentioned at the bottom of RubyGems.org is that that space was, for a long time, just companies that donated services to RubyGems.org. Ruby Central wasn't (and isn't) one of those companies, ergo no mention.

It should be noted the Ruby Central managers RubyGems.org as a community resource on the communities behalf, paid for by community members through our conferences. Ruby Central hasn't felt the need to advertise about RubyGems.org in the past (as the poll will show) because there simply was no need or reason to call it out. This was true for RubyForge, the precursor to RubyGems.org, and has been true of RubyGems.org since @qrush donated it.

[practicingdev]

Honestly I am surprised to hear that the RubyGems partnership thing wasn't an official and explicit thing because I went through way more work than I would expect the average would-be RubyTogether donor would to find it and it sure sounded like a legit agreement between the two orgs.

But no matter how that's sorted out, I think the main transparency issue that matters is that when people sign up for a RubyTogether membership, they ought to know what their money is and is not funding.

[adarsh]

Thanks @evanphx for the clarification and others for helpful discussion. I've taken this discussion and opened a PR (#8) with some proposed copy. I'd appreciate some feedback on the language here to ensure alignment, which we can use wherever. Certainly, if there is a better/different way to help clarify how RG is supported for the Ruby public, I'm all for advancing that.

[pixeltrix]

@evanphx I'm confused by your statement that you don't know what The Rubygems Partnership is since the announcement at https://rubytogether.org/news/2015-03-19-announcing-the-rubygems-partnership seems to be pretty clear there's two parties to an agreement, e.g.

We are pleased to announce that Ruby Together has joined
with Ruby Central to create The Rubygems Partnership, an
ongoing project to improve the stability and performance of
RubyGems.org.

Was that instead a unilateral announcement by RT?

[evanphx]

@pixeltrix This is just that my memory isn't as good as I'd like. I went back to find where we had discussed a partnership and did find it, it had just slipped my memory. It was formulated in a slack chat between myself and Andre mostly and I had just entirely forgotten. This was back in 2015 when most of the questions being asked now were not being asked. We agreed on the language on that page.

In hindsight, a few things:

1. I wish my memory was better. Sorry about the confusion.
2. There were discussions that should have been included on that page and weren't. Such as Andre indicating that he, at the time wanted to 'very strongly [to] position RT as "maintaining things before they go critical and become blocker to your work"'
3. It was a mistake on my part to not put out a joint Ruby Central statement at the same time to affirm the position from the Ruby Central side.

We are all well on our way to figuring out the next evolution of those statements to help make it clear to the community how things are paid for and managed.