Day 30 - Metakgp meetup to meet the candidates for Maintainer Election March 2017

19 Mar 2017 100daysofwriting · open-source · programming

Today, we had a Metakgp meetup to meet all the candidates in our upcoming maintainer election. So, to be clear, we are not looking for a maintainer for one of our projects, rather we are looking for a maintainer for Metakgp. Their roles are diverse but would include day-to-day management, resolving conflicts between members, making the right decisions with inputs from everyone in the community and pushing the community towards a consensus if the community can’t find it on it’s own, and finally fascilitating an environment where new people would feel comfortable joining and contributing. This role is much better described at the Metakgp:Governance wiki page.

We have a lot of candidates this year. And the process is proceeding pretty smoothly. Everyone who has made a few contributions on the Wiki and atleast one commit on one of the repositories in the Github organisation is eligible to vote in this election.

Today’s meetup was about meeting the candidates, getting to know them, and seeing them and talking to them about their ideas and proposals for metakgp and how they plan to move the community forward during their tenure as a maintainer. Personally, I just wanted to meet all these people who are probably going to be making some major decisions in the next 4-12 months. It was a great meeting, and it ran for about 3-4 hours and we talked about all kinds stuff with each candidate in turn. (It was structured too!)

There were a lot of points discussed, I would like to touch on a few of them here.

• Involvement of a professor

  At metakgp, we have been discussing getting a professor who can be “in-charge” of the group for a long time. Almost ever since it was formed. The main idea for this is so that we can have someone whom we can get to sign the documents that need a professor’s signature (mainly, room booking forms) with far less friction than right now. We have been dancing around the idea for almost 2 years now, and it has never materialised until now, when we truly discussed this rather seriously, probably because we are a student run organisation right now. We don’t have any funds or anything. We contribute for server costs, we use the free plans of most of the services out there. And not having any oversight ensures that we can do whatever we want, without the fear of offending someone in the process.

  Although, logistics does become harder with the lack of a professor and ends up being prohibitive when trying to organise talks or movie screenings. (Last year, Harsh Gupta and Vikrant Varma collaborated to organise a screening of the Aaron Swartz documentary)

• Introduction seminar / Workshop / Hack days

  In Kharagpur, each year 1400 starry eyed 17 year olds enter the campus as first year students. They are waiting to be poached by societies around the campus. To fascilitate this, Technology Students Gymkhana organises introductory seminars for all of the popular socieites like Robotics research groups, Technology Literary Society, Technology Dance Society, etc. Initially, I really liked this idea. It seemed like a great way to spread the word among a huge amount of people right when they enter KGP, and get them to start using metakgp from the get go. But a point that Sayan Sinha (@americast on Metakgp Slack) brought up was that people don’t get to learn anything at an Introductory seminar and thus it’s more or less a waste of people’s time and a lot of people might not even remember what was said there.

  This got me thinking about whether this is a good idea or a bad one. There is some kind of a compromise to be made here. Clearly, there need to be a few improvements to the basic intro seminar idea (bad) to add a few ingredients from the Hack days (good) to make the final result good.

  Personally, I feel that talks are a great way to spread knowledge, talk to people, and really get into the habit of sharing your experience and the things that you have learnt with others, not because they will not make the same mistakes, but because when they do, atleast they will know how to make it right!

• Core groups inside Open Source projects

  This is something that one of the people mentioned. I am not going to talk about it in today’s write up, I need to make sure that there’s no issue that they have with me talking about this. SO, I am going to leave it here.

• Getting people to contribute (and more specifically, getting more female contributors in KGP

  This has been something that was recently brought up on the Metakgp Slack #random channel. It is summarized here by Naresh R (one of the candidates in this election).

  Plainly speaking, to get more people interested in a project that you are wildly interested in, but they feel lukewarm about is an uphill task. There have been a lot of magical ways to do this that have been suggested in the past, but I am pretty sure none of these really worked.

  To make this happen in an environment where money is not one of the motivations to contribute and spend your time on a project is probably twice as hard (if not more). From the closely knit open source communities around prominent projects like Git, the Linux kernel, Ruby, Python, Rails, etc it is clear that even they are not able to “retain” people beyond an off hand patch that people send now and then to really understand how an organisation works (I sent one to GIT, too!)

  There are also probably some specific reasons why women don’t feel comfortable working on Metakgp even though most of our work and discussion is done online on Slack and Github, both of which are open to everyone. And the meet-ups that we have happen at neutral places where both genders can roam around freely. These are justifications as to why we are not biased, but there are some other things, like a low female participation causing fewer new female members to join, which I don’t know how to solve. Most maintainers have this on their agenda for their tenure, so I hope to be able to work with them and everyone else active right now to make this happen. Progress will probably be slow, but we MUST make what little headway we can.

POST #30 is OVER