[Election Question] Accessibility for non-Developers
Question for the candidates:
Inkscape has tried to be welcoming to both developer and non-developer contributions to the project. Do you think the project has been successful there? Is it getting better or worse? What could/should we do to recognize or encourage non-developer contributions?
Ted
On Wed, 2015-08-19 at 09:40 -0500, Ted Gould wrote:
Question for the candidates:
Inkscape has tried to be welcoming to both developer and non-developer contributions to the project. Do you think the project has been successful there? Is it getting better or worse? What could/should we do to recognize or encourage non-developer contributions?
Thanks Ted, great question.
Inkscape's communities are strong where they have had a place to grow. There's been a few issue with fragmentation historically from two places.
The first is the core project not being receptive to or not having the capacity to host useful and official spaces for a community to grow up. Because of this we have some inkscape communities which are quite disconnected from a main body.
The second problem has been the duplication of some services. This seemed to be mostly an issue with sourceforge, having forums, repositories are other things floating around in search results meant potential contributors hitting dead ends.
A successful community will be one where all the various community spaces we host have good solid links between all other spaces. Where integration is strongest and well defined, duplication is eliminated (sf, wiki, others) and free-floating inkscape resources are brought into the inkscape community first by getting their management into our project communication lists and second by link to and from our core spaces such as the website.
I'd also try and bring social media together. To know for sure that messages can be sent to twitter, facebook, tumblr, deviantArt all at the same time by project announcement would make me happy knowing as many tangential users as possible are up to date.
But then I might go further by trying to get the in-app notifications ready for 1.0, allowing us to announce to users who wouldn't even think a community could exist for a piece of software.
There are a few questions for how and when we should do some of these things; which would be a great conversation to be a part of in the board.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
Hi Ted,
<quote> Inkscape has tried to be welcoming to both developer and non-developer contributions to the project. Do you think the project has been successful there? Is it getting better or worse? What could/should we do to recognize or encourage non-developer contributions? </quote>
I think we're doing OK in both respects - certainly, I found Inkscape welcoming when I started out as a bug triager and then as a developer. However, I think the developer and user communities are largely separate entities who communicate in different circles (e.g., devs on the mailing list/Launchpad/IRC; users on DeviantArt & Facebook). I'd favour encouraging the existence of more of a "sliding scale" between user and developer, in which everyone is encouraged to contribute to the project if they wish, at whichever technical level they feel comfortable. That could be anything from contributing artwork to a gallery and spreading the word on social media, through to triaging bugs, translating or contributing code. I think we're getting better at this, now that we have a nice website with increasingly dynamic content... I hope it encourages the communities to meet around a common forum. We could, though, do more to (a) help and encourage users who want to contribute more deeply and (b) encourage more of a dialogue between the developers and the general (non-technical) community. This could include setting up Twitter/Reddit Q&A sessions, creating more tutorials (videos?) for new contributors, and supporting informal face-to-face user forums in a few cities. I think the board can play a role in shaping these initiatives and coordinating funding to start things off where appropriate.
Best wishes,
Alex
On 20 August 2015 at 21:01, Martin Owens <doctormo@...400...> wrote:
On Wed, 2015-08-19 at 09:40 -0500, Ted Gould wrote:
Question for the candidates:
Inkscape has tried to be welcoming to both developer and non-developer contributions to the project. Do you think the project has been successful there? Is it getting better or worse? What could/should we do to recognize or encourage non-developer contributions?
Thanks Ted, great question.
Inkscape's communities are strong where they have had a place to grow. There's been a few issue with fragmentation historically from two places.
The first is the core project not being receptive to or not having the capacity to host useful and official spaces for a community to grow up. Because of this we have some inkscape communities which are quite disconnected from a main body.
The second problem has been the duplication of some services. This seemed to be mostly an issue with sourceforge, having forums, repositories are other things floating around in search results meant potential contributors hitting dead ends.
A successful community will be one where all the various community spaces we host have good solid links between all other spaces. Where integration is strongest and well defined, duplication is eliminated (sf, wiki, others) and free-floating inkscape resources are brought into the inkscape community first by getting their management into our project communication lists and second by link to and from our core spaces such as the website.
I'd also try and bring social media together. To know for sure that messages can be sent to twitter, facebook, tumblr, deviantArt all at the same time by project announcement would make me happy knowing as many tangential users as possible are up to date.
But then I might go further by trying to get the in-app notifications ready for 1.0, allowing us to announce to users who wouldn't even think a community could exist for a piece of software.
There are a few questions for how and when we should do some of these things; which would be a great conversation to be a part of in the board.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel
Question for the candidates:
Inkscape has tried to be welcoming to both developer and non-developer contributions to the project.
Welcoming, yes, certainly. Any motivated people can easily find its place in the project. We now have regular contributor in all major aspects of the project (dev, translations, documentation, bug triage...). But sometimes I feel (from a bug triager's point of view) we're not that encouraging. Ok, we accept contributors, but we don't always motivate them as needed. When someone attach a patch to a report, it can take very long before a tester or a dev take a look and advice (we currently have 144 open reports with patch attached). I would find it very disappointing to see my patch stay untested for years, and probably wouldn't contribute again (random report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/176541, patch posted more than 6 years ago, still not tested). In a perfect world, all reporters should receive an answer as quickly as possible so that we don't give the impression that we don't care. Not easy, but could be improved.
Do you think the project has been successful there? Is it getting better or worse?
There are very good points: 1. The new website is a real improvement, with the help of lots of dev and non-dev contributors. The possibility to live edit and translate the site was a key point that led to that positive result. If you give the appropriate tools to users, they can become contributors. 2. I rarely visit the Inkscape-forum, but it seems very active. The LP Answer section is very active too. In 2008, unanswered questions were frequent. It's no longer the case.
Mixed feelings: 3. Bug triaging also improved since 2008. I never used the SF bug tracker, but LP is very convenient for that kind of task. So again, the tool probably helped. But what helped the most, IMHO, is the fact that new (and very high quality) contributors joined the team in 2009. Unfortunately, regular triagers are quite rare, and some reports don't get the attention they would need. Bug triaging is not easy. You have to know the application (or parts of it) as an advanced user, and have a good idea on how the features are implemented. And the job is somewhat ungrateful, particularly when you're triaging alone. Thus it's not something that's going to attract users, but it's not a lost cause... 4. Translators were very active up to 0.47, and I feel it got worse until very recently (we just added 18 new Indian languages two weeks ago).
What could/should we do to recognize or encourage non-developer contributions?
Say "thank you" to all our contributors ;) Invite users to report bugs (or comment existing ones) or new ideas in our tracker. Have developers help bug triagers test patches and triage bugs (e.g. after committing a patch, it could be useful to test all related reports in case some of them are incidentally fixed). Launch dedicated campaigns when we have special needs (translation campaign for forgotten languages?)
Regards.
2015-08-20 22:01 GMT+02:00 Martin Owens <doctormo@...400...>:
On Wed, 2015-08-19 at 09:40 -0500, Ted Gould wrote:
Question for the candidates:
Inkscape has tried to be welcoming to both developer and non-developer contributions to the project. Do you think the project has been successful there? Is it getting better or worse? What could/should we do to recognize or encourage non-developer contributions?
This overlaps somewhat with the first question from Tav, so my answer to that also applies here.
I agree with Alex's idea that it would be great to have more 'levels' at which one can contribute; right now besides core development, we can accept bug fixes, extensions using the 'black box filter' model, and tutorials. Emphasizing other ways to extend Inkscape, such as procedural templates, filter presets, symbol sets and scripts, could provide stepping stones towards core development for new contributors.
Another important thing is to make the process of contributing more discoverable. Distributing extra content (templates, filters, symbol sets, advanced tutorials, etc.) via our website and the 'installers' I mentioned would facilitate this, and furthermore it would be easier to give credit to the contributor. Integration with Open Clip Art Library was also a very good idea and I think it should be revived.
One thing that was not mentioned so far is our core programming documentation. The lib2geom Doxygen docs are in fairly good shape, even if sometimes incomplete or too terse. However, the Inkscape docs are rather spotty and lack a high level overview of Inkscape's architecture. I think that improving them would make life a lot easier for beginners. This task is in fact a very good candidate for funded development.
Regards, Krzysztof
participants (5)
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Alex Valavanis -
Krzysztof Kosiński -
Martin Owens -
Nicolas Dufour -
Ted Gould