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

[jic23@jic23.retrosnub.co.uk]

James Bottomley writes: 

> 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.

Sounds like a good idea to me, though it would only effect a tiny
percentage of our reviewers.  I suppose publishing a short list of the top 
n% of reviewers from which the lottery runs might give some
recognition. 

> 
>> 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?

Again, it's not much an an incentive (and has disadvantages) but
explicitly acknowledging reviewers for more areas in MAINTAINERS
might give them more of a warm fuzzy feeling! (keeping these entries
up to date is also important - another nightmare for Maintainers as
they don't want anyone to feel not acknowledged as they weren't
included in the 'official' reviewers list). 

They do then get personally emailed lots and lots of patches as a result
but they clearly like that sort of thing :) 

So to me it seems like it's the small stuff that just gives a warm
fuzzy feeling that may make all the difference. 

Jonathan
> 
> James 
> 
> 
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