Thanks @thea,
We seem to be starting a good trend over here. What do we do next?
@ramez What makes most sense to you? My instinct for the interim is to create a new forum category, say “Community Dev” and have this be a pinned topic. Happy to hear other thoughts
2 Likes
@thea, see: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/issues/7843 one issue when we want people to get involved is that lots of links to Meteor “projects” like WebApp are gone. They were on the website before and gave more overview on how Meteor internals are grouped.
Here you mention in my opinion about the same, a desire for people to take up the projects but there is no list.
@joshowens mentions the same. I think that should be a first quick fix, it’s not very difficult to get that online. The place where it belongs is in my opinion on GitHub as it being a technical overview on the core which should stay in sync. That will speed up developers start speed on Meteor because you know where to look for things.
What do you think on that? When it’s clear which projects there are then we can think about people to lead those effort but now the overview simply is not there.
Something like github.com/meteor/community repo with documents about guidelines, meteor structure, community roadmap, community general info (where did blaze go)…
1 Like
Thanks @thea
Personally (and this is echoed in the couple of comments right above) we need something stronger than a sticky post on this forum. Remember, many developers don’t even show up here. Github is where they go, and from there, they branch out to where is needed (e.g. links in Readme’s).
As Meteor evolves, I expect the community to really take the lead, and this means not being a backstage operator. I think we need a Community.md file and a mention of the community and ecosystem in the main Github readme of Meteor, and then later on, on the Meteor main website.
Again, this initiative we have here is super critical for the future of Meteor (and frankly it’s belated, we have only been using Meteor for 6-8 months so it took us some time to size up the ecosystem and the different players)
Indeed - what I am seeing here is its hard to get organized.
What I would like to see is: list of communities, leaders, current discussions, upcoming developments, how to join the development team, how to support, how to join the Slack, etc, etc.
Maybe MDG can do a new GitHub organization called “community” and add all the community leaders to it. That way, they could edit their “status.md” files and make it easy for other’s to join in.
I just proposed this idea in the Blaze repository, maybe it can be helpful for the all the projects:
One thing I think many of us are struggling with is figuring out what the state of Blaze is, what is being proposed, what has been discussed, etc.
That usually leads to a “read issue X” response - which I think may discourage people from participating because they don’t want to repeat something that might have been was said.
The other option is to read all the posts, but that’s not enticing as many of them are old, and the discussions are not structured well. It’s worse than reading a college textbook.
Maybe the real solution is to start a Trello board, similar to what Meteor had back in the good old days:
https://trello.com/b/hjBDflxp/old-meteor-roadmap-new-roadmap-at-https-github-com-meteor-meteor-blob-devel-roadmap-md
We can have sections like [Completed, In Progress, Planned, Ideas]. The first three sections could be locked down, and the fourth one (Ideas) can allow anyone to add a card and develop a discussion around it.
Feel free to chime in: https://github.com/meteor/blaze/issues/127
2 Likes
@lucfranken I agree that having it live on GitHub would be ideal as far as transparency, but will take more time to set up. I’ll chat with @benjamn about how this would work. I’ve seen a “community” repo as a central place for this orienting information work before.
@msavin do you mean a repo, as per @lucfranken’s comment? We’ve decided against creating a new GH organization for the time being.
Could you elaborate a bit more why that would take more time? Having a text document online (like the readme) is something we all can do quite easily?
To be clear, I don’t propose a new repo. Just put a document in the meteor/meteor repo. That’s directly connected to the code so when a packages gets removed from the central repo into it’s own (like happend with Blaze) the developer can fix that structure immediately and add a link to the new repo. Very simple.
We touched on this in our phone conversation, it’s likely organizational, not technical. Not everyone has admin rights to the repo so it has to be discussed internally at MDG and planned.
If we want community involvement why not just make a pull-request?
@lucfranken it is an organizational effort and necessitates some chatting with internal stakeholders in the project operations and communications. (To be verbose.)
First step was to create a community repo, which @sashko just did! I’ll follow up with a few conversations at MDG and we should be ready to add the list early next week.
2 Likes
ok looking forward to it
(Continued conversation from this post)
You’re welcome and thank you for your confidence in me. But I do not feel I should be on any list yet. I’ve done nothing more then writing a blogpost so far and work on a prototype. There isn’t any code yet to maintain and the blaze-apollo package is still empty.
So to become a maintainer of anything I suggest that there should be something to maintain first and I would like to earn my stripes by showing what I’m capable of.
Thank you for your effort though and I don’t want to discourage you in any way. But I personally feel it’s to soon to be on that list and think MDG should also have a say in it.
I agree with this. I think it’s a great thing that there is work being done in this area, but the list should be a realistic one. If just anybody who says “sure, I’ll do it” will be on there it won’t have much value, right? Maybe do it the other way around where people maintain something first and then put them on the list? The goal isn’t to have a list, but to know who is maintaining what.
I hope I don’t sound to harsh. I really like the initiative and think you’re doing a great job @ramez!
4 Likes
Should have an update for you later today. Thanks for your patience!
2 Likes
Hi all,
To update this, I’ve chatted with a lot of people internally to get a sense of how we can best organize these community efforts. Again, it’s great to see this level of excitement to take on more of leadership roles within the project.
Something that has come up a few times, and is echoed in @jamiter’s post, is that there should be intermediate steps between wanting to get involved and becoming a de-facto community maintainer. To the credit of all above, what that entails is not very clear in our current project documentation: How does someone graduate from reporting an issue, to triaging issues, to reviewing prs, to having merge rights? Does this path differ between meteor/meteor and other repos or packages?
To address this high-level issue, we’ll add to the existing contributing guidelines on meteor/meteor, as well as organization-wide guidelines and a list of current community maintainers, possibly on the community repo. We’ll also create a central place to keep track of the work we’re prioritizing on Meteor core, likely with GitHub projects, so it’s clearer where help is needed and what issues we’re hoping the community will take on.
For those of you who have already expressed interest in particular projects and initiatives, I’ll follow up with each of you to find a next step on your way to taking on more of a leadership role there.
You can expect me to set all of this up by next Friday – I’ll focus on trying to sent things up as simply as possible to the community can help shape what iterations of this project structure look like into the future.
6 Likes
As part of this governance structure, can we have some guidelines on equitable contributions and process to appeal decisions? In times past, there have been tendencies to have double standards on who is allowed to contribute and participate.
@awatson1978 Can you speak a little more to this? I’m interested in how you want to see things running more effectively.
1 Like
Maybe have a community standing committee that can be the overseer. If there is any arbitration or important decisions, the community reaches out to them. Maybe a biweekly or monthly meeting, documented minutes (aptly titled ‘the state of Meteor’) 