[ckan-dev] Issues/Questions/Cry for help.

Thu Jan 14 12:56:26 UTC 2016

Hi all,
Great mail Ross. From my experience I largely agree with Steve; it is also
a slightly technical problem: useful changes for CKAN core or popular CKAN
extensions often lie buried in the potential contributor's own "catch all"
extension and have to be extracted, accepted into the upstream code,
reinserted and then removed from the private extension. This is a lot of
boilerplate work and so it just ends up never happening. Its also sometimes
much quicker to work around an existing problem than really tackle the root
cause (a very recent example was the activity list count in the dashboard:
nobody removed it from CKAN core while it was causing a massive problem,
solving the problem was not trivial, but the main problem (long response
times) could be solved with a template change if you were happy to live
without the count display... easy to see what someone pushed for time will
do).

One thing that occurred to me right now is that contractors can maybe try
and orient themselves better with the CKAN roadmap - that ought to be a
virtuous circle: show clients the roadmap and get them excited about where
CKAN is going, then they might be more interest in aligning their needs
better with the roadmap and new code then gets written and contributed to
the right place.

Best,
Matt

On 8 January 2016 at 06:41, Steven De Costa <
steven.decosta at linkdigital.com.au> wrote:

> Hi Ross,
>
> 1-3 sound good to me. I like the idea of taking some time to refocus and
> re-delegate/renominate on issues.
>
> For 4 we can certainly do a blog post as a minimum. One of the things I
> think should be great for anyone contributing to CKAN is their ability to
> make a big difference and support so many substantial open data initiatives
> around the world.
>
> More than a year ago I gave myself the todo item of running a few jobs
> through fiverr.com to get flyers posted up in the ICT bulletin boards of
> campuses around the world (although I'm yet to get it done!). I think the
> message to promote is that the CKAN project is a great place to learn how
> to be a part of an open source community and get deeply involved in release
> planning and management as well as coding and contributions. Business
> Analysts can assist with user stories, use cases and test plans. Coders can
> work with both data and code to give them exposure to a wide variety of
> techniques that will advance their skills greatly.
>
> We'd have some compelling stats to promote the project if we looked at the
> number datasets and resources within just the top 20 or so open data
> portals using CKAN. Comparing this to the number of people contributing via
> GitHub stats would make it pretty clear that there is quite a bit of
> opportunity to gain significant exposure and self promotion for those who
> invest a few years or even a few months into the project during their
> studies or early years in ICT. The job prospects for those who have a
> strong grasp on CKAN look very good - potential for working with national
> Governments, major Cities, global non-profits, industry and academia. And,
> the option to found their own services business on the back of their niche
> skills.
>
> My limited experience is that those already working with CKAN
> professionally are typically flooded with client work. Their employers
> generally are happy for them to contribute where their contributions align
> with core duties but reality conspires against this more often than not and
> it remains up to individuals to go above and beyond to make extra time to
> contribute more. I think we could break this pattern by tapping into the
> greater time available to students and young professionals.
>
> Late last year I started and APAC meetup for those in a timezone which
> made it tough to join tech team meetings. I'm hoping to grow this more over
> the year ahead and will be encouraging people to become more active
> contributors via those fortnightly meetups.
>
> The first one for 2016 is 4 Feb and details are found here:
> http://www.meetup.com/Asia-Pacific-CKAN-Meetup/events/227933553/
>
> I'd be very happy to see folks at that next meetup, which can be joined
> via video, wherever you may be based :)
>
> Cheers,
> Steven
>
>
>
>
> *STEVEN DE COSTA *|
> *EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR*www.linkdigital.com.au
>
>
>
> On 8 January 2016 at 02:27, Ross Jones <ross at servercode.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I hope everyone that had holidays recently had a relaxing break, and have
>> managed to start 2016 with lots of energy!  I almost managed 1 out of the 2
>> ;)
>>
>> After a marathon tech-team meeting today I noticed that we’ve got to 320
>> open issues, which are not evenly distributed and I thought it would be
>> worth taking steps to rectify this before it gets even more out of hand.
>>
>> My suggestions are:
>>
>> 1. Remove the assignee if something has been marked good for contribution
>>
>> 2. Close anything over 18 months old with a message asking for it to be
>> re-opened if this is still an issue, and/or the reporter is willing to help.
>>
>> 3. Hold an amnesty for users with large numbers of assigned bugs to allow
>> the bugs to get re-distributed, specifically for issues that they don’t
>> realistically think they’ll get around to.
>>
>> 4. Encourage more people working with CKAN to contribute to core if/when
>> they have time to do so.
>>
>>
>> 1-3 are really just general ticket gardening, but I think #4 is a pretty
>> important one that is necessary if we’re to make CKAN ‘more awesome’ in
>> 2016 and it is obviously very important for sustainability.
>>
>> I’m not sure how to encourage more people to contribute to core - not
>> necessarily a huge investment in time, just the occasional ticket or
>> whatever they feel comfortable with.
>>
>> So my questions are:
>>
>> 1. Is everyone okay with points 1-3?
>>
>> 2. Does anyone have suggestions for 4?
>>
>> 3. Does anyone on the ML who uses CKAN (by writing extensions for
>> instance) want to contribute more?  Is there something that impacts your
>> decision to contribute or not? What can we do to help you start
>> contributing?
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Ross
>>
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