[IPython-dev] Communications, mailing lists, gitter, etc...
Scott Sanderson
ssanderson at quantopian.com
Tue Jun 30 09:20:22 EDT 2015
+1 for posting short write-ups of Gitter conversations. I wrote up and
example of what I think would be helpful both as a user and as a sometimes
developer
here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/jupyter/COhsW7rZgLc.
The basic format of the post is:
1. Here's the problem I have.
2. Here's my current best solution
3. Here's what's good/bad about the current solution.
Having a clear problem and solution statement is useful users who come
along later trying to solve the same problem. Having a review of the
strengths and weaknesses of the solution helps developers better understand
what the current strong/weak points are in the existing APIs.
Hope this is helpful,
- Scott
On Saturday, June 27, 2015 at 7:34:05 PM UTC-4, Fernando Perez wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> sorry for the cross-post, but this is precisely about project-wide
> communication. Probably best to keep the thread on the Jupyter list.
>
> As the project has grown, we've tried to adapt our communications channels
> both to serve the community and to manage our limited resources. Time for
> email is scarce (I know I'm not the only one perennially behind), and for
> certain problems real-time conversation is extremely valuable.
>
> So we've added gitter to our mix of tools, and in some cases our gitter
> rooms are very useful. But we're also finding a problem: it's proving to
> be very hard to follow the "big picture" of the project if you're not
> directly participating in those conversations. Even for *me*, since these
> days I unfortunately rarely have that kind of time, many parts of the
> project have become quite opaque, and reading gitter logs is not the same
> as reading an email archive. While it's perfectly viable to read a long
> and complex email thread to catch up on a discussion after the fact, doing
> so with a real-time chat log is, in practice, nearly impossible.
>
> So, we'd like to fine-tune our communication practices, so that we hit a
> better balance of having a "slow record" over asynchronous email, while
> allowing for the more rapid-fire discussion that real-time channels like
> gitter allow.
>
> The tools at our disposal are:
>
> - Our mailing lists (jupyter & IPython-dev)
>
> - Our gitter rooms: we don't want to kill them, we just need to adjust
> what we want to use them for, and probably reduce the number of rooms. As
> the number of repos we have grows, having dozens of rooms is probably not
> manageable.
>
> - Github: issues will continue being used by folks as a mechanism to
> effectively submit problem reports that, in practice, are often questions.
>
> - StackOverflow: not to be underestimated, it's archival, searchable, etc.
>
>
> I don't want to dictate policy here, so I'll propose a rough first draft,
> to allow for discussion, ideas and fine-tuning:
>
>
> - We try to do a better job of communicating important ideas, questions,
> discussions, etc, on the project lists. Let's encourage our users to do
> the same. We also post key announcements more regularly here. Everyone
> should really feel comfortable
>
> - We stop pointing people to gitter as the *first* help stop. We should
> point them to the mailing list (and? OR?) StackOverflow instead. Having a
> non-archival medium be the first point of help means a vast amount of
> duplicated and wasted time helping people.
>
> - The Gitter real-time help room and repo rooms can remain active but we
> try to maintain a discipline of using them only for when folks need the
> real-time collaboration. If key decisions are made here, let's try to have
> a discipline of periodically posting a quick summary, even if it's just a
> very short one, to the mailing list, pointing out what happened. In the
> long run, it will help us all better keep in touch with what the project is
> doing.
>
>
> What other ideas do people have, that can help us better communicate, both
> among project regulars and with the more occasional, broader community
> participants?
>
> Cheers
>
> f
>
>
>
>
> --
> Fernando Perez (@fperez_org; http://fperez.org)
> fperez.net-at-gmail: mailing lists only (I ignore this when swamped!)
> fernando.perez-at-berkeley: contact me here for any direct mail
>
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