Open-Source Maintainership and Community in 2016

Large open-source projects are changing the way they operate to reflect changes in maintainership and contribution patterns. Improvements in GitHub, test frameworks, and communication tools like chatops have made parts of OSS easier... and others way harder. In this talk, I'll walk through the evolution of our contribution and community processes on Puppet and its related projects over the last several years, to examine our successes -- and a few notable failures. I'll close with some ideas and suggestions, both to help maintainers improve the quality and quantity of their contributions, and to help both new and seasoned contributors have a great experience working on open-source projects.

Transcript

1. Open Source, Open
   Communities
   Maintainership and contribution in 2016
   Eric Sorenson // @ahpook
   eric.sorenson@puppet.com
   

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2. Old models
   Forces for Change
   Adaptations
   What you can do next
   

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3. Ye olden days
   

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9. Cathedral and Bazaar / ORA
   

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12. oh my zsh
    

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15. Recent Developments
    

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16. Recent Developments
    

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17. Recent Developments
    

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18. Recent Developments
    

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19. Recent Developments
    Registries and small modules
    

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20. Recent Developments
    

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21. Recent Developments
    meritocracy considered harmful
    

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22. Recent Developments
    meritocracy considered harmful
    

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23. Recent Developments
    

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25. - look for a project that suits your temperament as well as your
    technical skills.
    - if you're going to embark on a big feature or refactor, spend a
    little time talking about it first!
    - work on PRs iteratively and don't be afraid to push up a
    bunch of commits and squash it later.
    - work with your organisation to get approval to contribute back
    

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26. - set up testing infrastructure so you can give commit bits
    - find or create a slack community
    - don't tolerate jerks.
    - have design discussions in the open
    - find some way to flag your issues as being newbie-friendly.
    

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27. Photo Credits
    Photos are by Eric Sorenson CC/SA/NC except where noted.
    PDP-11 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3APdp-11-70-panel.jpg
    Collabocats - https://octodex.github.com/collabocats
    oh my zsh - https://medium.freecodecamp.com/d-oh-my-zsh-af99ca54212c#.g865cff22
    disrupt band logo - http://billtmiller.com/kp/disrupt.gif
    bicycle evolution - worlds best bike stickers
    fryman / chatops - talk at rackspace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhzxnY7FIvg
    meritocracy rug -
    collaboration rug - http://www.dailydot.com/debug/tech-industry-lesbians-who-tech/
    

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