The code of conduct at the Maintainers Summit

Posted Oct 23, 2018 8:57 UTC (Tue) by snajpa (subscriber, #73467)
Parent article: The code of conduct at the Maintainers Summit

It would perhaps be beneficial to distribute the meetings a bit, around the world, in parallel, have them at the same day and around the same topics...

I don’t have to talk with the top level maintainers, when we have guys like Michal Kubecek here in CZ community, who are able to brush off my rough edge and sometimes unnecessarily strongly held opinions and make me rethink, what I actually want, before I invest any measurable amount of time in developing something in a direction, which would hardly be ever merged.

The discussions we have - I believe - are about just the same, or at least of the same nature, as they would be with the maintainers who will actually have a final say, whether my stuff gets merged or not.

What I’m proposing shouldn’t substitute any of the existing meetings I think; it could be a new opportunity and a new tool, how to shape new contributors and have them up to the task, before they send anything. I think that would save at least some of the hard feelings, I can be sure of that, being my personal best example, believe me guys :))

That all is to say, that I already owe Michal a few beers ;)

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The code of conduct at the Maintainers Summit

Posted Oct 23, 2018 13:35 UTC (Tue) by pj (subscriber, #4506) [Link] (2 responses)

Sounds like maybe the Kernel Summit should be precedence/augmented by smaller more regional Kernel Meetups or something.

Kernel Meetups as a way of welcoming newer kernel developers

Posted Oct 23, 2018 18:01 UTC (Tue) by tytso (subscriber, #9993) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah, at the Maintainer's Summit we actually talked about trying to do some kind of more local meetings to try to get beginning/intermediate kernel engineers to have a chance to meet the maintainers.

It's a good thing to do from a public service perspective, and if there are maintainers that are willing to do that, I think that would be great. Maintainers are super busy people who have a lot of things that we ask them to do, so I'm not sure it would be productive to make participating in local meetups a mandate. But I certainly think it would be great if we could encourage the organization of some local "kernel development meetups" or something like that, and hopefully getting more senior developers involved.

Maybe we could leverage the LUG's in various regions, but I have heard some rumors that some of the LUG's have a reputation of having a fairly toxic environment of their own, and even if they didn't, many of the LUG's appear to have a focus which is more focused on users and sysadmins, as opposed to kernel development. Of course, there are some very strong LUG's, such as the ones which organize the SouthEaster Linux Fest (SELF) and the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE). So there certainly are plenty of possibilities....

Kernel Meetups as a way of welcoming newer kernel developers

Posted Oct 26, 2018 0:54 UTC (Fri) by ajdlinux (guest, #82125) [Link]

This is what we've tried to do at linux.conf.au with the 1-day kernel miniconfs that have been run most years. It's been great to see some brand new kernel developers given the opportunity to meet maintainers. But LCA is only once a year...

The code of conduct at the Maintainers Summit

Posted Oct 23, 2018 21:00 UTC (Tue) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link] (2 responses)

It's useful to know some local experts.

But: one of the ideas I think was that people feel more comfortable if they can put faces to reviewers, rather than just seeing them as strange sources of frightening feedback?

For that you need to meet most of the people that work in your area. And the easiest way to do that may just be to get a bunch of them together in one place once a year or so.

In which case it might be better to focus on figuring out how to get new developers to the big conferences.

I dunno, maybe it's best to try both.

The code of conduct at the Maintainers Summit

Posted Oct 24, 2018 0:32 UTC (Wed) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link]

You can only do so many events, and, as it was mentioned here, there already are a lot of conferences. That said, it's always helpful to know those people personally that you interact with regularly. While I'm not a kernel contributor, I can get very emotional when under pressure and had my experiences in that regard where I was seen as toxic by some people but personal interaction could clear up a lot of things (and I learned from those experiences as well). Local people also help because they tend to have a better understanding of your cultural aspects (us Europeans can routinely be harsh while not meaning it as badly as Californians or Asians may interpret it).
So, tl;dr, both local and in-your-contribution-area meetups make sense - if you have the time to attend and still contribute in a meaningful way.

The code of conduct at the Maintainers Summit

Posted Oct 24, 2018 7:03 UTC (Wed) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

> But: one of the ideas I think was that people feel more comfortable if they can put faces to reviewers, rather than just seeing them as strange sources of frightening feedback?

Although meeting someone is probably much better, putting a face on a reviewer can also be done without. A study suggested that radiologists work much better and find much more when they have a picture of the patient attached to the scan. I think I read about that in the Economist, but I found an online NYT article about it[1]. I wonder whether it applies in this context too, with e.g. profile pictures?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/health/07pati.html