[openspending-dev] Hey all newcomers! Should we chat?

Mon Nov 3 12:00:09 UTC 2014

Hi all,

TL;DR;

Reviving developer meetings next Thursday (November 6, 2014) with two
meetings to cover all timezones (topic: "Hello newcomers, how is
OpenSpending treating you?"):
* 12pm/noon UTC
* 23pm UTC

Longer version:

In the past months we've had quite a lot of new people contribute to the
OpenSpending core platform (we started compiling names of contributors
in June 2013 and since then we've gone from 18 contributors of code to
30 and that's not counting people contributing bug reports,
translations, documentations on community.openspending.org, code
contributions to other OpenSpending projects, advocates of OpenSpending
and other contributors to the project which we really should acknowledge
somewhere).

Somebody might say that 30 contributors is not a lot but given how old
the project is this is quite a lot an a 67% increase of new contributors
in one year (September to September) is HUGE! Thank you all new
contributors. We're growing very fast and OpenSpending is coming even
awesomer as a result.

However, measuring how many new contributors have gotten their code/pull
requests merged does not tell the whole story and I have noticed that
new contributors do not necessarily become active contributors
(contribute regularly). It might be that someone came just to fix one
bug that irritated them, it might be that they don't have time, it might
be that the code base was confusing but I can only guess.

I would love to discuss this with these new contributors so I want to
revive the developer meetings we had for some time and fell off the grid
back in January.

We used to have these on the first Thursday of every month so I suggest
we stick to that date (which is next Thursday). However, the
contributors to OpenSpending now span multiple time zones. We have
people contributing from the west coast of North America all the way to
Japan, 16 hour time differences (because we also have new contributors
from the east coast, central Europe and Asia).

This means it's going to be hard to find time where everyone can
participate so I'm going to propose two developer meetings next Thursday.

One at 12pm/noon UTC (which is 9pm in Japan) and another one at 11pm UTC
(which is 4pm on the west coast of North America). These will take place
on our IRC channel: #openspending on freenode.

I'll be there for both meetings and you can choose which one you'd like
to participate in. Hopefully we can learn something about the sleeping
routines of our community (that sounds creepy) so we can merge things
into a single meeting.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

/Tryggvi