Feedback for major sections of our community strategy document

[choldgraf]

This is a thread for discussion and comments around the major sections of the community strategy document described in this issue.

There is a sub-comment in this Discussion for each of the major areas described in that document. If you wish to have discussion and comments about a specific sub-topic, respond in the corresponding thread to discuss there.

[choldgraf]

mission and values of the organization (link)

[choldgraf]

governance and decision-making process (link)

[choldgraf]

Code of Conduct (link)

[choldgraf]

Community Practices (link)

[choldgraf]

@firasm thanks for these points, I agree with the added nuance that you're suggesting here. I'm happy to look at some suggested edits! Mozilla has this concept of the 'Mountain of Engagement' for projects, which basically says that the large majority of people will be only marginally engaged, and as you go up the "engagement scale", the number of people become fewer and fewer. However, everybody has to start somewhere, and most people start at the bottom. So the trick is building pathways for people to go from user -> casual contributor -> regular contributor -> maintainer, and also to do this along a few different dimensions other than just code development. I'll try and look up some of the Mozilla docs and see what I can find. EDIT: here is one post about it: https://www.openscapes.org/blog/2021/01/06/audience-building/

Also agree w/ @chrisjsewell that documentation improvements are a really helpful way for users to contribute - this is especially true because users have a perspective that maintainers don't have - they are not as familiar with the tool in the first place!

[foster999]

I think the project has done a particularly good job of reaching out to technical users and maintainers (through feature voting and these Discussions), but feel like there might be a gap in the accessibility for non-technical users to feedback or contribute?

I'm thinking of end-users reading executable books, who may not have the coding background or GitHub account to make contributions in these ways. The Turing Way for example provides points of contact via Google Forms or email, which are accessible to anyone. I'm not sure how many would want to engage in this way, but it could be supported by splitting contribution guidance by the personas of a few anticipated types of contributor.

[choldgraf]

@foster999 I think that's a great point - we have some unofficial contact points but mostly contact is via the GitHub issues and discussion board. The challenge with adding new communication channels is ensuring that we can sustain the effort needed to pay attention to them etc, but at the least having some ability for people to contact us outside of GitHub is a good idea. At the very least, this is a necessity in the case of Code of Conduct violations.

(and more generally, I think that we should basically just try and do whatever the Turing Way community does - that is a wonderful example of an inviting community :-) )

[chrisjsewell]

At the very least, this is a necessity in the case of Code of Conduct violations.

We do already have this @ebp-bot has executablebooks@gmail.com, which is specified in https://github.com/executablebooks/.github/blob/d55b5e5b65a984c4159de39b04fa8852aeae0315/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md#enforcement

[firasm]

Thanks @chrisjsewell and @choldgraf ! By the way, I certainly didn't mean any of what I said to be a criticism, just suggestions for improving engagement with average users.

I like the good-first-issue ; some other tags could be useful as well like, support-request or question, etc...

And really good to hear about the documentation improvements being welcome, when I have some time after the term is done, I'll go through and add some contributions at places where I thought things were confusing or hard to parse.

[choldgraf]

Organizational designation (link)