[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Recruitment (Reviewers, Testers, Maintainers, Hobbyists)

James Bottomley James.Bottomley at HansenPartnership.com
Wed Jul 8 07:37:08 UTC 2015


On Wed, 2015-07-08 at 03:29 +0200, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 08, 2015 01:21:40 AM Peter Huewe wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > In order to continue our traditions I would like to propose again the topic of 
> > recruitment, but this time not only limiting to the hobbyists market.
> > 
> > We are definitely short on reviewers and thus have mostly overloaded 
> > maintainers.
> > For testers it's usually even worse - how many patches are actually tested?
> > Judging from what I read on LKML not that many.
> > 
> > So we should definitely discuss:
> > - how can we encourage hobbyists to become regular contributors
> > -- how to keep people interested, the drop-out rates are huge.
> > - encourage regular contributors to become reviewers and testers
> > - reviewers to become co-maintainers and finally maintainers (once the 
> > original maintainer is used up or moves up/on)
> 
> Good topic.
> 
> Unfortunately, there are not too many incentives for people to become
> code reviewers or testers, or at least to spend more time reviewing patches.

We can alter that somewhat.  We used to run a Maintainers lottery for
the kernel summit ... we could instead offer places based on the number
of Reviewed-by: tags ... we have all the machinery to calculate that.  I
know an invitation to the kernel summit isn't a huge incentive, but it's
a useful one.

> Most of the time there's a little to no recognition for doing that work and,
> quite frankly, writing code is more rewarding than that for the majority of
> people anyway.
> 
> The only way to address this problem I can see is to recognize reviewers
> *much* more than we tend to do and not just "encourage" them, because that's
> way insufficient.

What other incentives or recognition mechanisms would you propose?

James




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