Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.I brought this up first for discussion in GDO's Drupal.org Improvements. The stats currently show declining participation over the last year. Now some of that is going to be going to http://drupal.stackexchange.com but Drupal is powered by a community, and so it is important to invest in keeping that community active.
One way to influence behavior is to make sure that you ask for what you want and thank people for behaving that way. Some sites make it a habit to say "Hi Mike, it's great to see you again!", or something like this. Even though it is automated, this type of feedback seems to be all over various sites.
Acknowledging what people are doing well also matters. We don't get enough positive feedback in our lives, and we can do a lot more to thank folks for contributing. This might not matter for old hats who will contribute regardless, but I do think for new users it could be very useful to make them feel valued.
I think for new users there's also an issue of not knowing how they can participate. I remember that there was some discussion about this in the Prairie Core Conversations in Chicago's DrupalCon (I think).
I do think we can do more to have Drupal.org align with the culture of the community. We're not boring and dry (like Drupal.org is most of the time). It's a fun, supportive, quirky, productive, excited community. It would be so nice if d.o could reflect some of that energy. Drupal is ultimately the community, not just the code.
Anyways, I decided to rough this out. It will need a lot of work in the language. It needs to reflect who we are when we are at our best.
We don't need to do more to encourage 1% or 9% of our community who are already contributing one or more issues most days. We need to work on the 90% of our community that mostly lurk. I think that was from Cory Doctoro's Clay Shirky's keynote (I think from the same DrupalCon).
- This encouragement should start with anonymous users. We want them to join or login if they haven't already.
- We shouldn't bother folks who have already contributed earlier that day.
- We can provide generic suggestions about what folks can do next to help move a project to Fixed.
- When it's fixed we should celebrate! Maybe even encouraging folks to tweet about it or document it.
- I've focused on the issue queue, but obviously it could also be applied to the forums & documentation.
There are screenshots attached and it's also live here:
http://search_api-drupal.redesign.devdrupal.org/node/2173171
Related to provide more incentives for participation are here:
| Comment | File | Size | Author |
|---|---|---|---|
| #8 | drupalorg_welcome-2185511-8.patch | 6.11 KB | mgifford |
| Anonymous.png | 190.75 KB | mgifford | |
| Needs_Review_No_Patch.png | 195.23 KB | mgifford | |
| Needs_Review_With_Patch.png | 188.09 KB | mgifford | |
| Active.png | 224.16 KB | mgifford |
Comments
Comment #1
gdemetTagging for Drupal.org Software Working Group.
Comment #2
deekayen CreditAttribution: deekayen commentedI don't necessarily object to these changes, but I still find your underlying assumptions a bit odd. I think Open Source contributions are an itch-scratching thing. The completion is its own reward, which makes "thank you"s not only low value, but even obnoxious noise.
By adding the color boxes, you're just swatting around the main issues. The UX of g.d.o sucking is one.
D7->D8 is not the usual version bump Drupal gets between major releases - going Symfony was a fundamental rewrite of large blocks of core. It changed the underlying development philosophy as deep as even the procedural vs OO fundamentals. It moves the audience from hobbyist coders to professionals only - hobbyists are dropping out. If you're left with only professionals, I don't think they're going to care about your "thank you" campaign or a callout box, they just want to clear out their JIRA or Redmine queues.
What you need is a way to connect a proprietary project in JIRA to Drupal.org. That's my struggle at CG. Right now, the idea I've got for Classic is to assign Guardr modules to developers to upgrade to D8 when core hits beta, but that doesn't necessarily involve any sort of innovation. Development managers need to be able to justify having their developers spend non-billable hours or to be able to bill for hours that get open-sourced.
Comment #3
DamienMcKennaI'm not specifically sure about motivating new people, but it'd certainly help with the constant questions of "is this fixed yet?" that I see in "Active", "Needs work" and "Needs review" issues.
Comment #4
BarisW CreditAttribution: BarisW commentedI believe that a simple text with "Want to help reviewing this issue, but you don't know how? It's easy!" with a link to a page that describes how to review an issue, would be helpful, especially to newcomers. I like the idea, but we really need some UX input here on how and where to display these kind of messages.
On a sidenote; I love the MailChimp messages, especially their tone of voice.
Same goes here. "Want this issue fixed? You can help!"
Comment #5
mradcliffeProviding help to users who want to contribute about how they can contribute to an issue is great. The core mentor web site does this by listing tasks that need to be done, and then how to complete those tasks.
I think drupal.org would benefit from having that list of tasks as a block in the sidebar.
Comment #6
mgiffordComment #7
mgifford@deekayen - Good to hear some clarification on your concerns. "Open Source contributions are an itch-scratching thing". I think of Plato's Gorgias whenever I think of itchy arguments. This type of open source development doesn't scale. Furthermore, it isn't something that works well for maintaining projects, certainly not large complex projects like many Drupal modules are. There's really only so many lines of code that any one person can effectively maintain while still earning a living and trying to do something that isn't tied to a computer every once in a while.
I'm trying to encourage conversions in popular modules to begin learning why people do and do not contribute. At least 1/4 of the top 100 modules on Drupal.org aren't maintained well enough to effectively support the websites that are using them.
I just put up a box so that it would stand out a bit. I'm not a design person, but certainly agree that it could be friendlier.
I disagree with the concern about D7->D8, although I haven't tried to upgrade a module yet. I don't think that the fear of Symfony is driving away D7 developers. It would be interesting to find out though. I am confident though that there are going to be lots of ways to engage people who aren't Symfony experts. For instance, as a Core Maintainer, I really don't understand Symfony and don't mess with that underlying code all that often. I should know more, but lack of knowledge isn't driving me from contributing.
Great to hear about your upgrade plans for Guardr. At this point I feel like we still haven't completely made the upgrade to D7 yet as a community. Partly because it has taken a lot of effort and everyone is expecting it for free.
@DamienMcKenna - Great to hear that it might deal with that "is this fixed yet?" call in the issue queue. Hopefully that will cut down some of the clutter maintainers have to deal with.
What do you think about suggesting that if a patch has been marked RTBC for 3 months suggesting a user reach out to one of the maintainers and ask what's stopping it from getting into a dev release?
@BarisW - It could be totally simple. But we could also make it quite customized. Ultimately we might want to give a different message to an anonymous user; a new user; a module maintainer; a person who has been a member for 4 years but never posted; or a Core Maintainer.
For instance, I've been posting to a lot of issue queues in the last two weeks. We could even leave little messages to say it's time to go outdoors and away from the computer. More likely, the note could just be empty if the person has already participated a bunch.
And ya, totally with the tone. Positive, even chipper.
@mradcliffe - Absolutely like the idea of linking to sites like http://drupalmentoring.org and supporting initiatives like that. I totally forgot about that. There are of course many others. There's no reason we shouldn't be actively linking to them in various issues.
There's also no reason that we have to have the same message. Some links & messages could be random. We could ask someone if they have thought about becoming a maintainer and point them to http://www.comaintainer.com
Whatever it is though, it shouldn't be a static, boring list of links that nobody clicks on. We've got enough of those. It should be short, positive, action oriented and fun. It should also change over time based on the metrics of user behavior.
Comment #8
mgiffordChange that includes some basic A/B testing.
Comment #9
hmartens CreditAttribution: hmartens commentedI think it's a great idea! I think this can go well with the gittip/tipping idea that we've discussed in another thread. I think we need to do whatever we need to do to get these popular/top modules more maintained and supported/commented. I share the fustration when I log an issue and the issues from a year back hasn't been resolved/answered.
I do understand the opensource concept but I do believe we've got a great community and we can do better!
I have seen that most/alot of people are using alternative platforms to get their questions answered like stackexchange and I still choose only to use D.O for that although my questions don't get answered ;) I do end up finding out the answers to most of my problems and comment on my posts on the issue queue on how I got it sorted or got around this problem.
A lot of modules on D.O. says it's well maintained although there hasn't been an update in over a year and peoples issues are not being attended to...I don't know how that works?
I might also be nice if the top 100 modules that are properly maintained and supported get a small druplicon or crown next to it so that you know that D.O. endorses/likes this module or just a kind of "hey guys, this is a great module and we suggest you use it and you can't go wrong with it"...it might help new people to the drupal ecosystem?
Comment #10
mgiffordThanks @hmartens! I appreciated your comments in Twitter too.
I don't think we do a good job highlighting those that contribute back to the community. Either as individuals or the organizations that support them. At least with this issue there's a way to engage new folks in taking that next step.
StackExchange has a great model to highlight folks contributions, regularly reward them for participation and demonstrate a solid knowledge-base. They do really understand Gamification and here in the Drupal community we haven't endorsed that yet. I started this discussion https://groups.drupal.org/gamification
I don't know that it's wrong to have support questions going to http://drupal.stackexchange.com
It's a potential loss of community involvement, but there's usually overlap. Perhaps we need to seek more. But bugs & support requests are different things.
I do think that there is value in quantifying what well maintained means in the Drupal community. I think we all have a definition for that when we select modules, but maybe that needs to be more structured.
It has to be something more than just a hand selected list of modules we love/trust.
Let me start a new issue about that.
Comment #11
mgiffordI just posted a follow-up issue to look at assessing & rewarding well maintained modules #2186377: Highlight projects that follow Best Practices
Comment #12
YesCT CreditAttribution: YesCT commentedtrying to find all the issues which depend on d.o being able to display context sensitive messages. tagging.
Comment #13
YesCT CreditAttribution: YesCT commentedremoving DWSG tag. It is on our spreadsheet of things to evaluate for priority.