Hari Shanker: And then.
Courtney Robertson: Then I will. Hari, I've extended Co. Host. I think over to you. If you could kind of keep an eye on the attendees and feel free to bump people. That'd be amazing.
Courtney Robertson: Alright and recording is back on. Hey? Welcome, folks! Glad to have you all with us. This is our kickoff and a bit of a discovery call to look at the sustainability aspects in Wordpress to set the context for that. If you were to go to the top of the wordpress sustainability teams site in their welcome box at the top
Courtney Robertson: the 3 pillars of what sustainability means to the Wordpress project are listed there. They are social sustainability, environmental sustainability and economical sustainability. Today's meeting will focus a good bit around the social sustainability element. Of this, however, I think that it could also relate to the economic sustainability as well as we begin to explore some of these things.
Courtney Robertson: I only have Georg with us for just a few short minutes. I want to introduce Georg Georg I met last year while attending Open Source Summit conveniently. I'm wearing the shirt. But during the chaos groups.
Courtney Robertson: particular track and chaos stands for community health analytics in open source software. So that very much relates to the ideas of social sustainability. And I went specifically looking for resources and things that might benefit the Wordpress project that we don't have to reinvent the wheel, for. So Georg is with both the chaos group and then the demo that we're going to look at today, which is Bittorja
Courtney Robertson: Georg? Would you like to say Hello.
Georg Link (he/him): Thank you, Courtney, for the brief introduction. Hi, everyone. I'm Europe, Link. I'm based in Omaha, Nebraska. My pronouns are he him
Georg Link (he/him): and I'm excited about all things metrics, community health, sustainability. And I appreciate the effort that the Wordpress community is putting forward in this area, and I'm happy to support and help along the way. So now that you know my face, if you see my name, you can put those 2 together. And
Georg Link (he/him): I yeah, I look forward to see where this goes.
Courtney Robertson: Fantastic. Thank you for joining us. I do wanna mention that York only has a few minutes with us today, due to a bit of a scheduled conflict, which is completely fine, since these were sort of announced with very short notice of a window. So I thank you all for being with us today. So where do we begin with all of this? I think I wanna start with just setting the agenda for what else we're going to look at. We started looking at social stats and sustainability and dashboards, and all of that
Courtney Robertson: from a lens of the contributor teams in wordpress needing more types of metrics. And a lot of that conversation began when you 20, maybe even earlier.
Courtney Robertson: And Matt spoke of it again at Word Camp Europe last year I properly set up a question, and he was kind to respond with the Stats dashboard initiative. And so the teams need ways of assessing what's going on. We know that right now, a lot of the data that we put out about contributions are either coming from roughly what we see in the 5 for the future listings and or the stats specific to releases.
Courtney Robertson: And there's a lot more data that could be made available. So we'll take a look at that. But I also see a few other audiences just to clarify a bit. We have contributor teams that need data. We've got wonderful people, some in this exact zoom that are looking for data that represents. Here is what I am doing and contributing to the wordpress project. I spoke with a long time contributor that has had contracts with several different organizations recently, and she indicated that she manually tallies up the information
Courtney Robertson: by going to various places and then lists it on the slash updates team site. And it's a really manual process for this person. So obviously, we've got some individual contributors that would benefit by having some more data representation about their work.
Courtney Robertson: Additionally organizational stakeholders. I will be the first to say my employer. I would love some more data to help me move the needle on getting more contributions into the wordpress project and bridging that understanding of things. And whether that looks like sponsoring other people to do that or allocating staffing our resources to the project. Both of those things. I think additional data would be really helpful.
Courtney Robertson: Finally, we got some project leaders, Matt, Josepha, and others that will share data about the project. And boy, wouldn't it be great to get them some more granular types of information?
Courtney Robertson: So those are audiences that
Courtney Robertson: I've come up with. If you all have additional ideas, drop them in the chat, by all means. But you know, broadly, we're looking at questions like, what does social sustainability look like? What does project health mean? Gauging interest from the community and ongoing participation in these efforts? And while Georg was here I mentioned Berta. I'd like to start screen sharing and show what we've got so far.
Courtney Robertson: And then, Hari, at any point, if you see something that I miss.
Courtney Robertson: Please do interrupt. So here.
Courtney Robertson: and let me make sure that all my notifications are off focus mode is, do not disturb
Courtney Robertson: other than you folks in the room. Does anybody else get this weird issue when you have multiple monitors that if you go to share a screen, Zoom will hide
Courtney Robertson: the monitors like, hide
Courtney Robertson: my windows. There you all are. I found you again. Okay.
Courtney Robertson: so hide the welcome box little bit, and let's take a look at what is but Georgia?
Courtney Robertson: So the very first one
Courtney Robertson: you could see that we have hooked up the Wordpress project to our Wordpress Github organization
Courtney Robertson: right now, that's the only data point that is connected. And this is basically like a trial beginner level account with Patrick Batura is an open source analytics platform. And it is using some of the tools that chaos group that I mentioned earlier has with it.
Courtney Robertson: Their website is chaos community, but urgent itself takes a few different open source projects and helps synthesize it together, as well as providing some additional coaching, consulting services and other areas that we can explore as a project
Courtney Robertson: so when we look through some of this, you can see that github hub itself is connected to this.
Courtney Robertson: But there are other data points that we could explore.
Courtney Robertson: So under. For instance.
Courtney Robertson: you can see
Courtney Robertson: that our wide overview shows us who our top get authors are. That's
Courtney Robertson: interesting. But we could see. Some of the companies listed here.
Courtney Robertson: and Isada has been doing some fantastic work at connecting
Courtney Robertson: individuals with the organizations that might be sponsoring them.
Courtney Robertson: Below, you could see that we get into how many commits and all kinds of great data, how many pull requests, etc. This is looking at the entire wordpress project. So one of the things that when Matt had first started speaking to this, he was referencing, doing so in the context of teams in particular. So I would suggest that
Courtney Robertson: moving forward, we find a way to help break this information down with different teams.
Courtney Robertson: Again. This being git Github.
Courtney Robertson: we'd have to identify which teams on which repos which slack channels, etc. So as it comes together.
Courtney Robertson: we have Github Prs, and inside of that you could see things like, let's go into what gets a little different is
Courtney Robertson: Let me see if I can actually zoom my screen further. Then. Yes, that might show up a little better on
Courtney Robertson: the recording for later.
Courtney Robertson: So you can see submitters by organization. You can change, for instance, instead of the last 90 days. Hey? We are now 21 years old. I could tell you we weren't using Github 21 years ago, but if I say, give me 20 years ago. It will dig back as far as we have been. And I could hit update.
Courtney Robertson: And so you could see in different windows of time
Courtney Robertson: how far back that information goes. What gets pretty interesting as we're looking through. This is, you could see top people that are submitting again. I would love to break this down and say like, Show me the people in Gutenberg that are submitting issues. Show me the people in this and that that are submitting issues. And I think, additionally, aside from Prs, we have a lot of folks that engage on Github discussions. So that's something I'm considering, because I think that's a valuable part of contributing.
Courtney Robertson: We have comments down below. So obviously, if people are leaving feedback on github issues that could be really good to elevate as well. Not just did they submit the code for that issue. But are they participating in the rest of the conversations?
Courtney Robertson: give me just a moment. My mouse doesn't want to
Courtney Robertson: show me.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah.
Courtney Robertson: let's do an exit that page and let me hit reload to get back in there.
Courtney Robertson: crashing my browser. That's just me today
Courtney Robertson: under this community area.
Courtney Robertson: Let's see if I can.
Courtney Robertson: Oh, boy.
Courtney Robertson: that would be
Courtney Robertson: Org. We'll just go back to Batras's main page instead.
Courtney Robertson: Excellent.
Courtney Robertson: This, by the way, is only happening because we are
Courtney Robertson: on a webinar today
Courtney Robertson: wouldn't happen otherwise.
Courtney Robertson: Let's try community here we go. And then, if I go into, for instance.
Courtney Robertson: Let's go to
Courtney Robertson: demographics.
Courtney Robertson: There's a lot of fun data that we could start getting from some of this, and there are ways to filter this down.
Courtney Robertson: You could see that we have.
Courtney Robertson: For instance, let's say, data status
Courtney Robertson: within the last 10 years. There's additional things here.
Courtney Robertson: So we can get
Courtney Robertson: lots and lots of different types of data. And we could also see, for instance, in some of the issues
Courtney Robertson: who writes issues that sit in the backlog. And what are the oldest things that we've got? And how should we handle some of our oldest issues?
Courtney Robertson: But Georgia, as a system, though.
Courtney Robertson: can actually integrate some other tools and technologies. I'm going to switch over from looking at the wordpress, one that we see so far to the public available demo, which is for the Chaos group, so Cure hooked up all of the data points for the Chaos group that they would like to include. And you could see that they've got a tab on their version called data sources, and that includes things like being on the mailing list.
Courtney Robertson: Being an Irc, docker, slack
Courtney Robertson: even some Twitter data. They used to be able to offer things like Meetup, and at this time don't. But I love that. These other areas are there and available, because we know that going to meetings in core and other types of teams
Courtney Robertson: being in those meetings is actually quite a bit of contribution effort. And that's not necessarily reflected anywhere at this time. So it'd be really great to be able to include some more of those types of things. And you could see that they're listing here. The participants, and based upon the number of messages York did share with me that in this process that. Anything that is a threaded message may not
Courtney Robertson: be accounted for. Usually during meetings the times that messages get threaded, I think, are attendance. Most teams, I believe, try to not have things threaded. But I also consider what are other data points of the project. That we are looking at that might want to be reflected when I was doing a a
Courtney Robertson: bit of a spreadsheet nerd in terms of let's go find all the places where things happen right, and so git github wordpress itself
Courtney Robertson: revising a post. We know that, for instance, on learn and on word camp sites, people revise those posts, not just create it so, but can import Rss again. That would be beyond our initial trial type of project. But it can ingest some of those types of things, and it would be nice to get wordpress revisions in there instead of just rss, so that we're not looking at who published, but rather who last revised something.
Courtney Robertson: Additionally, it does not include track at this time. So those are 2 big chunks of where the work that is the wordpress project are happening. I don't. I would want to maybe talk with people that are more familiar with the design team to understand where the design team does a good bit of their working process, too. I know that it's somewhat in figma.
Courtney Robertson: but not exclusively so to be kind of aware of some of those. So I just kind of cross referenced this was current as of 3 weeks ago, which means it's not current now, but all the slack channels and the Github repos and things. I did a pass to bring that up to date, so I would like to maybe swing back through and do that again. But that's a bit of a demo about Batura itself. And noting that Georg has had to drop off. But for the recording purposes
Courtney Robertson: I will be publishing the recordings, and also synthesizing all the notes from those. I have a couple of questions, though, to maybe get some of us started, and I see that our chat is quite active. Let's hit, stop, share, and I will jump over to also check out the chat room brief before we go.
Courtney Robertson: Thank you, Hari, for sharing all those things that's fantastic. So I believe everybody will be able to request at least audio. And then for those that would like video I think we have to extend Co host permissions for them, Hari, and
Courtney Robertson: we know the folks here, so I feel pretty safe about doing that. I wanted to make sure we were able to use the Rcp. Feature, which is why I picked Zoom Webinar over Zoom Meeting for this.
Courtney Robertson: So you saw a demo of Butterja. There are other tools out there. Some folks are suggesting a few other options. One I saw that came in involve something with Google, and it would essentially be like a we would have to build it ourselves. And
Courtney Robertson: of course, then that means
Courtney Robertson: getting contributors to then build something like that. So we're not saying that we're locked in on any one system, any one tool. We should do some due diligence to explore what's out there. But this is our first round. But church is our first round of exploring some of those options and considering for the project some of the data points. So I'd like to get some feedback from the folks that are here
Courtney Robertson: about what kind of data would be helpful for the team that you contribute most to, and or your role in contributing
Courtney Robertson: anybody.
Courtney Robertson: Hari, could I ask? I might put you on the spot. But as as I hear a lot of silence at the moment what kind of data would help you make some good decisions.
Hari Shanker: Oh,
Hari Shanker: I always have a ready answer for this, because this is this is on the top of my mind.
Hari Shanker: Since I work on contributor experience. I would mean a lot of the data that we've mentioned in in the post. So the express thing to so for core and general contributions.
Hari Shanker: I would like to see track data first of all, like.
Hari Shanker: Track activity, and you know contribution.
Hari Shanker: pulled mergers and all that. So like activity, even comments and track that. So anything that is done on track the mergers be comments. And of course, like we already have, Github
Hari Shanker: and I would like to see event data, and I'm I'm excited that we are potentially at least moving away from either.com so. And and I, I see we have Mike here so super excited, huge gather press fan here.
Hari Shanker: Yes, I would love to see event data and as much as possible across the platform. So essentially anything that we do in our network. And
Hari Shanker: all the data in in the make network, like we comments, we posts. Meet any other activity even, which includes translations, of course. So.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah.
Hari Shanker: Much of the trackable data as possible. I would like to see them.
Hari Shanker: and since I work on 5 for the future.
Hari Shanker: going back to some points which you mentioned earlier, Courtney. I would like I would love to see you know, like so again, going back the point you mentioned about how companies would like to see the impact of their contributions. So that is something that I hear a lot as somebody works on this program.
Hari Shanker: So I would love to see that out there and in public, in in transparency, like
Hari Shanker: companies, would like to see the impact of their contribution. So you know, and we saw a bit of that in wet yeah, in the dashboards. But again, that is really limited to Github. I know there's a entire world of contributions outside of Github. So if an organization can see the impact that their contributors are making which we don't have, there's no easy way to track that. And as you mentioned, folks have to go through, you know, like make updates, or to manually compile some of these things.
Hari Shanker: and and and so this is a big item on my wish list. I would love to see release space data so like Jb, orders has done a fantastic job, you know, publishing those posts after every release that we see a this is the. These are the work that is being done. So if we have a system in place which can show all this information in one nice little dashboard.
Hari Shanker: Yeah, that would be mentally helpful.
Courtney Robertson: I will!
Hari Shanker: Also say that.
Courtney Robertson: The the data does export as Csv files. By the way, for those that are interested in knowing that the Wordpress version of Patricia Dashboard right now being hooked up only to Github, it also still requires a login to get into that, and we may or may not want all the people to have all the access. So that was something that folks have asked for.
Courtney Robertson: You know, we don't wanna reveal all the stats things that we probably don't want to widely publicize, or people that have stopped contributing to the project. They have their reasons. We don't need to draw like a a spotlight to that and that's understandable. But if we notice a trend overall that we're not seeing contributions well, that would give us some better insights into things.
Hari Shanker: And now I'm adding on to what you said, Cody. I think what would be helpful is especially for make teams, as as a former team. But for the community I would love to see where the team is struggling. And I think this this data will be immensely helpful for us to find out like, and and going back to the title of your post and the purpose of this call, project Health. So for each team, like we we can, we can accurately measure like how many contributors do we have, and how many will folks are needed? And
Hari Shanker: if we have a bird's eye view of you know the number of tasks that need to be done, and what are what is out there, and even for the project entirely like, if you have a list of important projects, that these are the projects that need help. So if somebody who is coming into contribute as a new contributor, they would know.
Hari Shanker: hey, I would probably need to work on projects XY, and Z, to make the most impact. So in my mind, having this out there and dashboard. I I think that that's gonna be immensely, incredibly valuable.
Hari Shanker: Nope.
Courtney Robertson: Thanks. How about others of you there? Bergett is saying in the comments there way to measure also local contributions like meetup groups and local conversations in slack. So I, and Mike, are you able to audio chat today? If not, it's okay.
Mike Auteri: Here.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah.
Mike Auteri: Here.
Courtney Robertson: So so the the word was earlier. Last week I was exploring some things with with York. At the beginning of this meeting folks had a chance to meet. Gorg indicates that meet up changing all of their Apis a while ago that the Batura ability to integrate to meetup
Courtney Robertson: may need to get deprecated. However, I'm gonna let Mike say whatever Mike would like to say regarding that.
Courtney Robertson: however much you're willing to share so far.
Mike Auteri: I'm I'm sorry I I just I literally got a ping from something important while you were saying it.
Courtney Robertson: Oh, yes, yes, yes.
Mike Auteri: My, my my attention is all over the place. I apologize, but we'll see the question.
Courtney Robertson: So so Batura and others may not have any viable data coming from Meetup and Berget is asking, Is there a way to also measure local contributions like meetup groups.
Courtney Robertson: and maybe local conversations in slack. So the local conversations in slack, I would say, I don't think I don't know the capacity of us to hook up multiple slack instances. So that's a good area for us to consider. If you're get but, Mike, any insights regarding alternatives to meetups that you would like to speak.
Mike Auteri: I see what you're. I see what you're doing.
Mike Auteri: Thanks. Yeah. So project that's been going on for a bit. Now is a project called Gather Press, which I've been involved in for a few years, and has been taking some as a been gaining some steam over the last, especially last few months. In fact, we have a meeting with Angela tomorrow to start working on a green light of a trial based on a proposal, Patricia, Bt. Put in back in January. Some of you may have seen it.
Mike Auteri: If you
Mike Auteri: don't, I can get the link I could post in the chat in a moment. But, yeah, we're looking to do some trials. With some meetups that are willing to do
Mike Auteri: switch over to a wordpress powered event management system. That's very similar
Mike Auteri: to meet up in a lot of ways. But hey, we have all the data and that's kind of what we're getting at. Right here is we have very limited data we can get from. Meet up some of it. They don't give us some Apm Api endpoints that Courtney mentioned are just broken. So which isn't surprising. But so yeah. So we're at that stage now of
Mike Auteri: like in the next couple of weeks, and leading up into word camp Europe talking about the upcoming trial with a few meetups that want to
Mike Auteri: try to do things in tandem with a wordpress powered platform.
Courtney Robertson: Which then again leads back to the impetus that if we would like to see tools that can
Courtney Robertson: can manage the wordpress revisions and the like.
Courtney Robertson: that shifting to something like gather press
Courtney Robertson: could help with that, both in terms of an organizer publishing the details about their upcoming event, to perhaps attributing people that attend, because in some locales it's considered to be professional learning and development or attending such things. So that could be really an interesting way to go about getting some of that data, if you're good again. Very exploratory still
Courtney Robertson: not making promises, but looking to. You know what are some some options for us to help
Courtney Robertson: pull this thing together really
Courtney Robertson: have them.
Hari Shanker: If I can ask a quick follow up question on what? On burgets? Id, and what Mike mentioned so I think definitely meet up groups are, what are we build as replacements for? Meetup groups are way to solve this problem. But I think the there's a part of what both you mentioned, which is local, slack instances.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah.
Hari Shanker: I was wondering if there's a way to, you know, connect to them, connect to those slack. And you you mentioned that a bit about slack integrations.
Courtney Robertson: Boom.
Hari Shanker: So I think that might also be valuable. Because and and I've heard this a lot from the international community being a part of some, some of which myself, there's a lot of contribution activity in Lu local slacks which kind of get ignored in the mainstream. So as we build this dashboard if there's a way to tap that in that that might be help. I don't know.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah.
Hari Shanker: Exactly which is.
Courtney Robertson: I I did reach out to Toby toward Bjorn. Who is our polyglot's team? Rep. I believe it's technically team Rep, just to kind of brief them on some of these details coming together and start the inquiry of how glut press works. But there, get to your point about local slacks. I know that, for instance, the Italy is clearly on the brain. Since we're coming up on work camp Europe. I know that there's a lot of activity in the Italian slack community. Specifically
Courtney Robertson: their translation efforts.
Courtney Robertson: I myself am only bilingual. When it comes to computer languages. I have.
Courtney Robertson: I can order food in Spanish. It's about my language extent. Sadly. I need to improve that. But for those of you that have a lot more depth of knowledge in that area than I do about how all of this works. I would love a good list of questions like.
Courtney Robertson: There, get your to your point about the local slacks. That's something that would be delightful for us to think about.
Courtney Robertson: coordinate with
Courtney Robertson: those of you that have stakeholders. To that you're trying to say. Hey, here are the needs of the project. What kind of data do you think the stakeholders may also want?
Courtney Robertson: I know internally for me, it's
Courtney Robertson: And my employer. We sponsor a few different open source projects, one of them being the Javascript foundation
Courtney Robertson: and open Js open jsf.org.
Courtney Robertson: and in doing so in the Javascript foundation. Sure, some staff contribute occasionally, some more than others, but then, additionally, fiscal sponsorship is really what a lot of times certain projects would need. Others need
Courtney Robertson: bring the laborers and get it, maybe get people sponsored. So I've I've thought about like
Courtney Robertson: what kind of data points would actually
Courtney Robertson: help us make the case
Courtney Robertson: to sponsor people as well.
Courtney Robertson: I don't know if anyone has ideas around that
Courtney Robertson: data to the contributor. Profile activity log
Courtney Robertson: was looking at Beerget's question while I'm waiting to see if others have ideas too.
Courtney Robertson: will the dashboard also push certain data to the contributor, profile, activity, log, good question. Something probably to explore.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah, I do think that everyone has been offered Co host. So by all means, you can be on video. You cannot. It's it's your call folks. But yes, I think that we could explore some of that
Courtney Robertson: right now. That would be building out some custom integrations, I think. Not saying yes or no, because I'm not the decision maker. Frankly, I'm just trying to help facilitate, like, what are the
Courtney Robertson: what are all the factors that we should consider?
Courtney Robertson: Yeah.
Damon Cook: I just have a like a kind of an observation, I guess, but
Damon Cook: 2 things are kind of at the front of my mind is like, you know, I love the idea that we're
Damon Cook: surfacing the invisible contributions to, you know, just just making a more transparent. So there is less invisible contribution. So that you know that is what I see as a direct outcome of these dashboards. And
Damon Cook: and I love that. And I think that's great
Damon Cook: so that's my first in observation, and second, not really related. But I think just something for us all to consider, and I don't wanna like
Damon Cook: it to be like throwing a bunch of orange cones before the construction begins. Or.
Damon Cook: yeah, cause I think it's something that will develop naturally. you know as a conversation and consideration. But just like, how much data do we want to surface publicly like you hinted at Courtney? Like, you know, companies that may
Damon Cook: have a 5 for the future pledge, and then kind of drift away from it. But and so, whether you know that which is totally acceptable and just natural. And
Damon Cook: but do we want to have some mechanisms in place to kind of, you know, like maybe automate, that if
Damon Cook: they or they opt out of, you know, temporary, you know, data like how that is handled and how they can
Damon Cook: kind of manage their their privacy. I think
Damon Cook: there could be some nuance, and you know conversation around that. But I think that'll a lot of it, will
Damon Cook: I? I think. Personally, I mean, this is like all it'll be fascinating to me to see. Do we lean in to having all the data available and start turning things off? Or, you know, do we have that conversation early on and kind of try to be proactive about. It's yeah. I don't expect any answers, for sure, but I just think it's interesting to comment.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah.
Courtney Robertson: 2 quick thoughts that came up during that we could also explore
Courtney Robertson: some of the data that potentially could be available by going to their company listings, and then whoever maintains the company listings might be able to then share some of that info like, give them a a toggle about how much to publicize or not.
Courtney Robertson: those that are familiar with data, science and big data. So big data being, this is a lot of information, a whole lot of information about the Wordpress project, which is great. But those that have worked in data science understand that you can use the data to tell the narratives you wish to tell, and we need to assess which narratives
Courtney Robertson: the project wishes to tell, and which narratives maybe we don't want to draw a lot of attention to again citing especially individual contributors that have decided to no longer participate. That's we have no reason to let the public see necessarily that this person is. You know, the things that they're they're going through, although I'm open for anyone to challenge my presumption, certainly. But I think that
Courtney Robertson: exploring which bits of data go public. And then also looking for people within the Wordpress project that also already have a really strong understanding of data science, and might want to contribute in terms of how do we sort through this data Keork was mentioning to me, and I would imagine other platforms could do some of this as well. That if we want to do things that are exceed, what's dashboards themselves do that? What does also do is make some Apis available so that we can use other systems
Courtney Robertson: for that. So we can output the data into various other types of systems as well. So that's something that we can explore. If we want to do something unique that
Courtney Robertson: really exceeds the scope, we could still do it. We just need to find the people that can help both dev and data science it.
Courtney Robertson: Yep.
Courtney Robertson: yeah. Who do we know.
Birgit Olzem: Data.
Courtney Robertson: Science.
Birgit Olzem: Yeah. What I would love to discuss is, how do you do? We want to go into the demographic guidance for individual contributors. So we need to be careful about exposing someone. Maybe. So
Birgit Olzem: there must need. I? I think we need to make sure that the profile has also opt in, and maybe also as a more into opting in to get data collected instead of opting out.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah.
Birgit Olzem: Especially for the data privacy
Birgit Olzem: especially in countries and and regions like Europe. We really need to make sure that the personal data is always opt in instead of opt out.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah, I I do like that idea as well. I think again, looking at our 5
Courtney Robertson: listings, the most logical place that a person may want to get the data. Maybe
Courtney Robertson: maybe a contributor wants to get all of the data about them
Courtney Robertson: and see all of that data from their own experience of looking at their profile in their 5 listing. But maybe they don't want it to be on their.org public profile, because I already know a few of contributors that
Courtney Robertson: the
Courtney Robertson: are happy to continue contributing some getting sponsored. But for various government
Courtney Robertson: security access issues. Don't wish that data to become public
Courtney Robertson: in any means.
Courtney Robertson: So there are some good use cases to that. But you're good. You've got me thinking. Thank you.
Birgit Olzem: I'm I'm very pleased that that we have the chance to discuss others, because
Birgit Olzem: especially looking for like having some demographic data is really interesting, especially for the health of the project to see how we are aging as a community. It's it's more like an gut feeling but we don't have really data on that. How many contributors are under the age of 25, for instance? And so, but it's also like, like the
Birgit Olzem: like a balance act between gathering personal data which can have some backslash and not only for security when you are working for government, for instance, but for the own security and and privacy. So, on the other hand, it is
Birgit Olzem: much needed. Have some form of data in that point of view, also, for I guess, for stakeholders to see when we see for contributors to get maybe some jobs in the wordpress, industry and.
Birgit Olzem: Also to to
Birgit Olzem: yeah, to to showcase how they are growing in that. So yeah, it is really difficult. I'm I'm I'm still working on the Survey questions for the Dib working group. And it is really hard to to determine which data can we get or
Birgit Olzem: which did that? We don't. We don't have to, or should avoid to us. So yeah.
Birgit Olzem: yeah, so.
Courtney Robertson: Those are. Those are all really great points.
Courtney Robertson: Hmm!
Courtney Robertson: It's good stuff.
Hari Shanker: If but if I can ask you a very quick follow up question on that. I I I love the idea first of all. And I, I, I personally have not thought of it before. And I think it's important that we
Hari Shanker: build in privacy to this, as we, you know, create this dashboards. The question that I want to ask you is.
Hari Shanker: What do you? What do you think should be the data that should be opt in and what do you think is would be the data that sort of like can be allowed?
Hari Shanker: because I I sense that, especially in in context of governments and all that.
Hari Shanker: It might be risky even to have contribution data as
Hari Shanker: sort of like available by default, even though we assume it. I mean, when somebody is contributing. It is kind of assume that that data should be public.
Hari Shanker: So what are your thoughts? Should should we? Just.
Hari Shanker: I mean? And and it would make sense to build this into whatever we we built. As we're we're trying to do something new, right? So
Hari Shanker: so my question is, what are your thoughts? Should we start by default opt out like with all the data which includes contribution and everything?
Hari Shanker: Or maybe some data points should can be allowed like, for instance, someone's, you know, Github activity, or some something that they've done in the make it work. But include this, this, allow all sensitive information like maybe their personal characteristic. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
Birgit Olzem: Yeah, that is a quick the question I'm asking myself, especially
Birgit Olzem: I'm not sure what data will be collected. And which will have a kind of an so that you can identify a person on their behaviors on all their contributions. Okay, to be as a contributor to an open source. Project means, and a first place, that the most contributions are public because we are tending to have some transparency on who's contributing to what?
Birgit Olzem: But having that? In an data context, which may have more impact on
Birgit Olzem: to identify a person and maybe on their religious beliefs or maybe other. I'm not thinking about it. This is a big field. I'm I'm not that professional into the ethics about this but I think we we really need to make sure that we
Birgit Olzem: consult with someone who is more
Birgit Olzem: aligned with that but for my gut feeling we need to make sure that there's no data available about the the age, the gender the belief would does have any kind of backslash, maybe to someone. Currently, I I don't see that there is
Birgit Olzem: big issue because most people are tending to be careful how they fill out their profile data. But maybe certain data, will
Birgit Olzem: collect some
Birgit Olzem: device data, what devices they're using and that can also get back into how they're using that. So yeah, I think we we need to consult with someone who is more in depth into the data, privacy?
Birgit Olzem: and yeah.
Courtney Robertson: No, that's actually a good point, Isota brought out a link for those.
Courtney Robertson: So I've mentioned the Chaos group a bit. Azada couldn't be with us today because she's actually at an event
Courtney Robertson: with Paterja, which is delightful. And so there's a practitioner guide things to think about when interpreting metrics. I dropped the link in the article there. I've I've pointed several of us in this together today to this group because they already have things like metrics related to
Courtney Robertson: are equivalent of core developments. Like the types of things that can be measured, or there are types of metrics about Deib, and or that presence related to events, but not ex explicitly for events. There are metrics around accessibility of the project, so they have examples of this is a Linux Foundation project, and they've got some examples of things that various open source projects
Courtney Robertson: may wish to look at. So I've dropped the link into the chat that's there. I'll bring up kind of one of the things that I saw when I first announced the these on a couple of the posts in sustainability. Andy Friggin shared about one of the areas. And I don't know, David, if this might get you thinking about anything from a a core perspective as well. But Andy shared about
Courtney Robertson: looking at at the
Courtney Robertson: quantity.
Courtney Robertson: Or how do I put this the right way? Andy and Colin have done a great work around a lot of the early efforts for the rollback features that we now have, both for plugins and also moving on to other parts of of rollback. So
Courtney Robertson: A lot of that was built as a Plugin first
Courtney Robertson: may or may not have been reflected in poor
Courtney Robertson: slack. Specifically, there was effort into writing the Wordpress core team articles about this right? So there's a lot of other things before it actually comes to emerge. And so I understand that right now. Our method of getting props and core
Courtney Robertson: is interesting. It's at least something But of course, then, you know, as a project we're always looking for. How do we improve ourselves? So I don't know if there's any blind spots that I don't know of for those of you that are more routine core contributors. We've got at least 3 here that are more
Courtney Robertson: related to contributing to core than I tend to be. I I often will contribute to releases by means of either training team or assisting with proofreading some about pages and that type of thing so that gets counted as 1 one prop. Yay, even though the effort might be a bit, David, any thoughts that you bring.
David Baumwald: Yeah, I I was just gonna echo that. It's it's a long
David Baumwald: long history of and John Deroziers has done a lot of
David Baumwald: thinking and posting and talking about this. But it's
David Baumwald: everything just becomes too subjective. If you go away from the
David Baumwald: one prop thing.
David Baumwald: the the only, the only way that we ever
David Baumwald: even
David Baumwald: get close to multiplying a prop is as a committer. You can self props so like if there's a a ticket that you've put significant, they call significant effort above what is expected as a committer.
David Baumwald: you can self props on the commit.
David Baumwald: and then, because you you already get one props from the merge itself.
David Baumwald: And you can get a secondary one. I think I think it counts as 2 when you self props in the end.
David Baumwald: but I I have. I I think, in all my time I don't think that I have ever done that. Because
David Baumwald: because I feel like it's kind of taken advantage of the system.
David Baumwald: and I I'm not the one. I'm not one of the ones that tends to be more liberal with props. I I tend to take a a more subjective look at it and say, Okay, did this person actually
David Baumwald: contribute in a way that is
David Baumwald: that matches? What so like, if I've given props to 4 people and 3 of them. Really, really, really, you know, can
David Baumwald: really contributed. And then the other one is just like.
David Baumwald: you know. Oh, this this is mincing a period at the end of this sentence. Of course you sell props, but then you
David Baumwald: or you give them props. But there's
David Baumwald: it's it's all it's all subjective at the end is what I'm trying to say is like you.
David Baumwald: I think every single committer when they look at this stuff they're like.
David Baumwald: I really wish I didn't have to get props for this, or on the other side, which is probably a hundred times more common, because we're all pretty generous.
David Baumwald: is I wish I could give 10 props
David Baumwald: for this
David Baumwald: and one props for this. But again everything just becomes rejected. There, there's no way to know but in talking about Doc
David Baumwald: which is what you brought up with, I mean, he's he's done so much work with with rollback, with plugin dependencies as well. That shift in 6.5
David Baumwald: He's a long, long time contributor. That is not a committer
Courtney Robertson: And in fact, he he does this as his therapy or hobby time when he's not in trauma surgery in the Or. This is a hobbyist contributor, if ever there is one. Dr. Andy Fragan.
David Baumwald: Which you know in in the end it it's amazing what he does. I I got the wonderful opportunity to hang out a lot with him in San Diego a couple of years ago. And
David Baumwald: It's it's amazing that we have hobbyists like that that have these diverse backgrounds. But at the end of the day anyone that's not self sponsored is in the same boat or not sponsored. They're in the same boat. It that
David Baumwald: working on core is their hobby, even if, even if, like me, I've not never gotten paid a single penny for anything I've done in core never been, you know, even whatever. But I write a a whole crap ton of code every single day, and I love it
David Baumwald: and make a lot of money doing it. So but yeah, go going. I wanted to mention that because I think what Doc is getting was getting at with him. And Colin.
David Baumwald: is, you've literally got thousands and thousands and thousands of lines of code that they've written.
David Baumwald: Yeah. And when it comes to merge.
David Baumwald: their name is mentioned once in the Pops line.
David Baumwald: and you but but if you but there's so many ways that it can be gamed to, you know. Oh, well, for instance, I I saw Riad's name pop up. And so one of the Bitersia things.
David Baumwald: And in terms of number of commits and and lines removed, lines added. Well, a lot of that is is, is Npm packages.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah.
David Baumwald: That are that are, you know they they end up being a you know. Npm.
David Baumwald: install blah blah blah blah blah, or there's a
David Baumwald: you know. It's a it's a hash change in the package that ends up in the package lock like that ends up vastly exaggerating what the actual contribution was.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah.
David Baumwald: So.
Courtney Robertson: That's very good to draw attention to. I saw Adam Zelensky also, I mean Adam does phenomenal work in the playground. But I also see that Adam Adam has, like
Courtney Robertson: multiplication, times more of props for what Adam does, and that's exciting. But also I. It causes me to want to dig in more, David, as you were talking. I you know, when we were you were talking about lines of code. So I think, having more than just one.
Courtney Robertson: You know, we have props cool. Maybe we keep that going that that could be still useful, not saying that we're needing to shutter anything that's currently in process, but also with a tool like Paturja. What you can actually do is then say, well, on this release, show us people that have significant numbers of lines of code merge show us, you know, these things. And then we would have
Courtney Robertson: multiple kinds of data to report related to a release rather than just a single. Here's props. And then it tells
Courtney Robertson: multiple stories with that type of information.
David Baumwald: Yeah. And and like I mentioned, I think it just everything would have to come with a with an asterisk, saying, You know, this isn't necessarily a good metric. It's one of many that can be used.
Courtney Robertson: Yes.
David Baumwald: You again, you can have
David Baumwald: one commit that merges thousands and thousands of lines of code, or you can have multiple ones that merge periods ends of sentences or adding a ticket number to to unit test. That was added something that's just, you know.
David Baumwald: not really high value. But you could do hundreds of them. And
David Baumwald: are you really moving the project forward with that sort of thing? Sure, it's
David Baumwald: it. But it's it's like the janitor that hates their job, and is there to just collect the paycheck.
David Baumwald: It's not. It's not meaningful contribution,
David Baumwald: but at the same time, you know, like, like I've discussed with other people. So some people, that's all they can do. Like me, for instance, you know, not being sponsored.
David Baumwald: I I have to make my money elsewhere. So you've got people. This is. This is what's so amazing about Doc, is the fact that
David Baumwald: as Hobby Time built these feature plugins that end up merging into core.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah.
David Baumwald: So he. So not only do you have the time to do it, but it's
David Baumwald: it's the foundational understanding, the architecture, the discussion, everything that goes around that
David Baumwald: that people don't understand. I don't have the time to dive, dive into a single ticket.
David Baumwald: much less a feature. So these people are heroes. And there's been. So there's been. The the committer thing in core is really the only way we can recognize someone.
David Baumwald: Yeah. And for outstanding work other than.
Courtney Robertson: The.
David Baumwald: Wrongs.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah.
David Baumwald: And it really, it's not a good thing.
David Baumwald: because the committer bar is extremely high. I will say in most cases it's extremely high.
Courtney Robertson: -
David Baumwald: And requires a lot of effort over years to gain that.
David Baumwald: And then, once you're there
David Baumwald: There's nowhere else to go above that.
David Baumwald: there's there's there's no more. Once you get there, you're you're you're done now to the people that are involved.
David Baumwald: We all know who's doing things. And and there's you get more and more respect. But but outwardly
David Baumwald: the project itself, recognizing that it doesn't exist.
David Baumwald: No.
Courtney Robertson: That's good, very good. I see your hand up as well, too.
Birgit Olzem: Yeah. Thinking of the props situation is it brings also a difficult imbalance into acknowledging contributions to the workforce project. Because the the core contributions by writing the code seems to have the the highest impact
Birgit Olzem: but it doesn't bring on the table all the other contributions around it about translating wordpress creating documentation.
Courtney Robertson: Training.
Birgit Olzem: The design team, who who makes it visible so, and also also also.
Courtney Robertson: And then the support folks.
Birgit Olzem: Teams, the.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah. The support team almost.
Birgit Olzem: And recognition.
Courtney Robertson: And there.
Birgit Olzem: The the the community organizers, and also different several working groups. We don't have any kind of good guidance on how to prop someone's work. So for instance, when I'm thinking about concepts about did. And how do we run policies?
Birgit Olzem: That is nothing. What I can share publicly yet, because it needs to be have some approval or something. So I don't get any public prop for doing that work. But doing that work behind the curtains. Because that is also the security team. They don't have the ability to share what they are doing because of security concerns.
Courtney Robertson: Yes.
Birgit Olzem: The incidents. Response team, a response team. How many tickets do they work on? That's not nothing we can share publicly, and we don't have any systems in place yet to acknowledge also that kind of work and.
Courtney Robertson: You just sparked another idea beer get is that one of the things that we should probably track is help scout or whatever other email tool that we are using. I'm just dropping that in my comments to for later. So plug and review team heavily uses help scout but several other project. Several other teams within the project are very much reliant upon help scout, I think, incident, report
Courtney Robertson: their their things land in help, scout for sure. Or, again, whatever other email ticketing tooling system that is
Courtney Robertson: semi-private would do. Yeah.
Courtney Robertson: good conversations. Nora and Adam, I would like to. If you've got any thoughts, ideas that you would like to share. By all means, please do.
Courtney Robertson: I think this has been a lovely conversation so far.
Norah Medlin: I do see that David is raising his hand. I don't know.
Courtney Robertson: There you go. I think David just had it still up from before. Yeah, you're good.
Norah Medlin: I I might have. I I was. I was distracted by something else for a few minutes, but I did look through the comments. And you know, I I see that we're talking about crediting especially non code.
Norah Medlin: and I and I come. I I also come from the drupal space. So
Norah Medlin: drupal space, there's a lot of focus on crediting. And you know, I think there's some things that work well and don't around the crediting. I'll be honest, you know. I think that
Norah Medlin: one lesson is that in order to do crediting even for non code
Norah Medlin: items
Norah Medlin: you need to have some sort of ticketing system around that, and I think
Norah Medlin: part of that with the open source, you know. Sort of mentality in general is that you know those things should be exposed to the public. In some way, shape or form. So the having the private, you know, sort of management and our ticketing systems is shied away. You know. And the drupal community specifically, just because you don't get that exposure with using Ajira or some other kind of whatever you know that you're using to communicate.
Norah Medlin: And there is a lot of ha things that happen outside of you know the the standard ticketing system. That don't get captured. And and so there's this effort. So the sort of downside, I guess you could say is that there's this duplication of effort that's required project management or maintainer. You know. Type, individuals need to
Norah Medlin: create additional tickets in the ticketing system. And you know, utilize that contribution piece. You know, feature. Whatever of that ticketing system in order to attribute to, you know, for those individuals that were involved.
Norah Medlin: And so a lot of it, even though the end good intention is there, for, you know, contribution, non code contribution to be attributed to individuals that are individual contributors in that way. It doesn't always happen as well as as even when the features exist, you know. So there's still a lot of human effort involved with all of this and
Norah Medlin: you know, I think, that that some in some ways there are
Norah Medlin: you know. I think that there are, there's always room for improvement, so
Norah Medlin: like when it comes to docs. For instance, I just had one thought there that if you have your docs being controlled by a change, you know. Control system of some kind.
Norah Medlin: Whether get or get hub or whatever it is. You know, you could have that potential of
Norah Medlin: attaching some sort of kudos, or or what were we? What was everybody calling it? Here? Props? to, you know those specific changes? Because you have a change control for docs, for instance.
Norah Medlin: But not always, you know. I think. You know, there always be those extra things. So so that's pro. That's where having this sort of separate
Norah Medlin: system, you know, you know, crediting system of some kind is valuable. It's just to keep in mind that the the
Norah Medlin: you know, if you don't have automation around it? You're gonna have to rely on people, you know, to click those buttons, to to
Norah Medlin: give that acknowledge.
Norah Medlin: Yeah, yeah.
Courtney Robertson: That's why I think that having some tools that are catered for this might be really beneficial.
Courtney Robertson: For the project. Because then.
Courtney Robertson: then, that information, I think, is is
Courtney Robertson: a
Courtney Robertson: takes the the work because I've been a team rep a couple of different times, and the work of tallying up who should get a badge. That's not a good topic we we touch today, but doing that leg work of being a team, rep and figuring out who should get a badge, takes away from the rest of the work of what I could be doing instead to move things forward. Right? So I I appreciate having some automations there.
Courtney Robertson: Yes, we are quite close to the end of the time, Adam. Fine, if you don't have anything you would like to share. But if you would.
Courtney Robertson: I want to make sure that you've gotten some opportunity.
Courtney Robertson: Give them a few
Courtney Robertson: breathe.
Courtney Robertson: 2. Okay.
Courtney Robertson: cool. Hari asks in the comments. I know we're almost at the close highlight, the point about tooling, while the church is amazing. I think we should keep an open mind and look at other tools for our dashboards absolutely agree. Blocker is cost involved. And so we want to be transparent in that process right now, automatic is paying for a $1,000 fee for the beginning trial level. That we have.
Courtney Robertson: Tools are definitely not cheap. So we're looking at the options that are out there doing due diligence we could also run Grimore and Grimore gives us a good chunk of what Patarja has. It doesn't give us quite everything. It is its own open source tool we would have to host. We would have to do the work of setup.
Courtney Robertson: there are other ways. There was a proposal for using a Google type of dashboard system that we would build ourselves. There's a lot of things for us to factor in. So I think, having this conversation today.
Courtney Robertson: We certainly heard some really good feedback from some people that we know and trust quite a bit that we understand represent different parts of this project. And oh, yeah, have we thought about? Have we thought about? I value that so much with you folks? I think that takeaways from some of this will look into, you know, accounting for some of these additional ways that we can continue improving things for others exploring tools that will help us get there, and tools that will help us.
Courtney Robertson: you know, get the data points that the teams that the individual contributors, whether they be hobbyists or sponsored. But they're just representing themselves through their company hours and company time. That's fine. Things that move the needle forward in organizations that can and should be sponsoring perhaps more than they are as well as then, project leaders, because again, I love seeing the bubble charts and state of the word. But I would perhaps like to have a better representation of the project there, too.
Courtney Robertson: So yep, thank you also very much for joining. I will be doing 2 more of these tomorrow and one on Thursday, before I travel off in person to hang out with Damon at word. Camp Monclair can't wait for that one. If you have further ideas. If you would like to share this with other people, point them to the post on sustainability. Ask them to come, leave their ideas. I will get these recordings up
Courtney Robertson: as quickly as I possibly can, and I will, after we get through all of those.
Courtney Robertson: if all goes well before I see Damon in person, maybe have a synthesized list of points that came out of our times together.
Courtney Robertson: Thank you also very much.
Courtney Robertson: I'll hit. Stop record.
Adam Silverstein: Thanks. Gordon.