Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainers Support Group

[Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com>]

On Wed, Sep 20, 2023 at 01:52:19PM -0600, Shuah wrote:
> On 9/19/23 17:21, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> > On Tue, 19 Sep 2023 16:55:29 -0600 Shuah wrote:
> > 
> >> As I replied to Ted and Randy, I think the proposal James pointed to is
> >> where we could start and evolve that discussion to the actions such as
> >> support group, instead of starting with a solution without looking at
> >> the bigger picture.
> >>
> >> https://lore.kernel.org/ksummit/ab9cfd857e32635f626a906410ad95877a22f0db.camel@HansenPartnership.com/
> > 
> > I saw this when James first posted it. I may have been the lone figure to
> > do so as I had to point it out when the topic came up a second time ;-)
> > 
> >    https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230817104622.511c61b4@gandalf.local.home/
> > 
> > I'm all for having this discussion under James topic, but this idea of a
> > Support Group is something I've been discussing with other maintainers for
> > some time. I believe I even mentioned it to you while on the bus in Dublin.
>
> Thank you. Yes. We talked about this last year at Dublin. Work of being an
> Open source developer and especially a maintainer demands emotional labor.
> This is definitely a risk factor for burnout.
> 
> I happened to com across an article today about burnout risk factors and some
> of those are faced by maintainers and developers. If you are interested, I can
> send the link.

Collecting interesting (and hopefully useful) resources is a fairly low
effort exercise, so I'll start:

"Negotiating the Nonnegotiable", by Daniel Shapiro
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/314284/negotiating-the-nonnegotiable-by-daniel-shapiro/

The hard part will be finding time to read all the useful resources.

> > One of the things the TAB is working on is to come up with a "Communication
> > Style" document that will be focused on how submitters should speak to
> > maintainers and how maintainers should speak to submitters. The idea is to
> > help people understand the POV that others are coming from. But that's a
> > discussion for another day.
> 
> Formalizing the communication is a good idea - I keep translating maintainer
> and developer speak to new developers I mentor often enough to see the value
> of such an effort. :)
> 
> > Anyway, with the majority of the [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] submissions related
> > to this, I think it should definitely be discussed at the maintainers
> > summit.
> 
> I would recommend discussion this prior to the Maintainer summit in an open
> session to get input from developers and maintainers who aren't invited to
> the maintainers summit myself included.

I wonder if I'm stating the obvious, but trying to figure out ways to
handle psychological problems in a group made of software developers
seems like we will be fairly short on essential skills for this kind of
exercise. Given the size of the affected community, I think we could
find ways to get professional help.

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart