Re: [DISCUSSION] Growing the Git community

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sep 20, 2019, 17:43 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqsgoqvp6s.fsf@gitster-ct.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <71fba9e7-6314-6ef9-9959-6ae06843d17a@gmail.com>

Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> I. Goals and Perceived Problems
>
> As a community, our number one goal is for Git to continue to be the best
> distributed version control system. At minimum, it should continue to be
> the most widely-used DVCS. Towards that goal, we need to make sure Git is
> the best solution for every kind of developer in every industry.

I have quite a lot of problem with this attitude to place the world domination as the ultimate goal, even though it may call for the need for sub-goals, one of which is this one,

> The
> community cannot do this without including developers of all kinds. This
> means having a diverse community, for all senses of the word: Diverse in
> physical location, gender, professional status, age, and others.

that I can 100% agree with. Also I agree that the tactical moves listed like improved onboading and documentation (omitted from this response) are all good.

> After we put items 1-4 in place, we should reach out to the
> general tech community that we are interested in new
> contributors. It's not enough to open the door, we should
> point people to it.

I am also somewhat negative on this.

I want to see our system to support the use cases of its users well, which would lead to its users being happy to use the system.

I think that (and in the remainder, I won't write "I think that" for brevity) it should be the primary goal. By being a system that is useful and pleasant to use, we may gain more users, and we may gain users from many more different fields and industries and make these new users happy. But it should merely be a result, consequence of being a good system for its users, and not a goal of its own, to acquire new users from new industries.

And by being a project that works on such a good system for its users, with welcoming atmosphere to those who are prepared to reciprocate the same respect while interacting with us, the community may attract more new members, developers, advocates, tech writers, etc. It should merely be a result, consequence of being a good community for its members, and not a goal on its own, to acquire new community members.

We first should make sure that we serve existing users and existing community members well. So well that other people who are not yet our "existing" users and members would want to become part of us, in order to join the fun and share the benefit. If we cannot serve even the existing members well, we shouldn't be talking about acquiring new members.

Growth and the world domination may come as a consequence, and I would not reject it when it happens, but we should not be actively seeking it.

It follows that "in this quarter, we acquired these high profile projects as users", "we have this many new contributors this month", "the acceptance rate of the patches from contributors with less than 3 months experience dipped by 20% this month" etc. are not best measures of success. What's preferable would be yardsticks to gauge the community-member happiness (e.g. "This many percent of total community member population have been active this month").

Thanks.