Taking steps towards realizing the community strategy goal - Fedora Contributor Activity Statistics ARC Investigation Completed

Project Discussion
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1

tldr[1]

Here’s the exhaustive ARC[2] done for the Fedora Contributor Activity Statistics project which will help the driving forces for the Fedora Project Strategy 2028 to better identify/incentivize/reward the contributions made by the community members and address the parts of the community that could use some attention in streamlining the contribution workflow.

https://fedora-arc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/fcas/index.html

niwtrtlv[3]

If you have not already, now’s the best time to go through this thread, form some ideas around the said subject and comment your opinions there before you start off with this thread.

Over the course of the last six weeks, the Community Platform Engineering[4] team has been working on finding ways to support the Fedora Project Strategy Goal 2028 of doubling the number of active contributors over a given period of time. Alongside, @mattdm[5] and @jflory7[6] - myself[7], @zlopez[8] and @amoloney[9] from the Community Platform Engineering team worked with James Kunstle[10] and @cdolfi[11] from OSPO data science team to work on finding ways with which we can identify contributions made by the community members - reliably and objectively.

The problem statement was definitely not as easy as it looked on the surface when it came first to the team’s attention as an issue ticket[12] on the Fedora Infrastructure issue tracker[13] and the solution[14] that was initially worked upon was quickly deemed insufficient[15] due to the grown-up scope[16] of the project as well as the possible technical complications[17] that could come while scaling up the existing solution. As a result, greater focus has been put into tracking most (if not all) kinds of contributions and generating trends to understand how a subcommunity develops with time.

If you have participated in the aforementioned thread started by @smooge - I would ask you to go through the treatise that provides the answers to the following questions.

  • What does the existing solution look like[18][19]?
  • Why does the current solution fail in addressing the requirements[20]?
  • What reliable statistics sources do we plan on probing into[21]?
  • What data elements we plan do we plan on exploring and why so[22]?
  • What does an “objectively identifiable” contribution look like and their examples[23]?
  • How do we attempt solving the problem of reliably tracking non-technical contributions[24]?
  • What technologies do we plan on using to implement such a tooling[25]?

As much as I attempted to answer the question about the actions that count as “contributions” and the people who count as “contributors”, I could not quite come close to getting a 100% satisfactory answer but it is alright. Had the question been easier to solve then we could have called it a Fedora Project strategy goal for 2023 and not 2028 - I cannot emphasize enough how crucial it is to not rush to get to a definition of a contribution and/or of a contributor and risk missing out on certain kinds of important contributions. I do hope that this investigation report helps form some thoughts and opinions about the idea and in the long run, helps us point towards the teams/workgroups that could use some assistance in onboarding and retaining contributors.

I do plan on running a workshop[26] to run a brainstorming session about reasoning actions that count as “contributions” and people who identify as “contributors”. Apart from the @council[27] folks (who I think could both contribute to the discussions and use the outcomes of it), everyone is invited to help us define these and the ARC investigation should give you a good starting point to form ideas around the topic. As always - please feel free to reach out to the Community Platform Engineering team if you were to find any discrepancies in the said report, if you want to collaborate with us on the community projects or if you just want to hang out with some cool people!

  1. Too long, didn’t read ↩︎

  2. https://fedora-arc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/workflow.html ↩︎

  3. No, I want to read the long version ↩︎

  4. ↩︎

  5. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Mattdm ↩︎

  6. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Jflory7 ↩︎

  7. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:T0xic0der ↩︎

  8. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Zlopez ↩︎

  9. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Amoloney ↩︎

  10. ↩︎

  11. ↩︎

  12. https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/issue/11149 ↩︎

  13. https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/issue/11149 ↩︎

  14. ↩︎

  15. https://fedora-arc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/fcas/creation_fail.html ↩︎

  16. https://fedora-arc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/fcas/creation_fail.html#external-reasons ↩︎

  17. https://fedora-arc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/fcas/creation_fail.html#internal-reasons ↩︎

  18. https://fedora-arc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/fcas/creation_workflow.html ↩︎

  19. https://fedora-arc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/fcas/creation_gram.html ↩︎

  20. https://fedora-arc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/fcas/creation_fail.html ↩︎

  21. https://fedora-arc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/fcas/solution_datanote.html ↩︎

  22. https://fedora-arc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/fcas/solution_dataeplt.html ↩︎

  23. https://fedora-arc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/fcas/solution_examples.html ↩︎

  24. https://fedora-arc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/fcas/solution_examples.html ↩︎

  25. https://fedora-arc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/fcas/solution_techtool.html ↩︎

  26. Hopefully, during Flock To Fedora 2023 ↩︎

  27. ↩︎

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