Okay, no

[branchandroot]

So, anyone at all can submit pull requests to the OTW github, now. Supposedly, this way "experienced coders" can help in a drive-by way without having to jump through all the volunteering, form-filling, hoops.

That's nice.

Except for the part where you still need to jump through the hoops to get a development environment, the thing that lets you see the code from the back end. Without a development environment, the only way you can write a drive-by bug fix is by installing a local version of the Archive on your own computer or webspace which effort, the github documentation specifically says, will not receive any help or support. ETA: That's a bit better. A Windows install will not be supported, but there are some docs available for OSX or Linux; the Secretary has also added a link to the new IRC channel, which is entirely laudable.

And why the hell should anyone go to that kind of trouble? In what way is that "casual"? In what way is this actually useful? ETA: In particular, how is this useful given the OTW's history of bad faith and abusing their pool of volunteers, to date? How is a "well, it's better than most" barrier going to convince anyone who's been watching this train wreck for a few years, now, to dip a toe in?

I am seriously out of patience with this run-around, and the misinformation someone is evidently feeding the rest of the org. Whoever first suggested that opening up pull requests alone would open up development in some meaningful way? Lied.

And if there was no active misinformation, then I'm sorry but chalk up another mark for incompetence. I'm honestly not sure which I'd prefer.

Comments

[niqaeli]

Hahahahahahaha!

*wheezes*

Good job I've written off the AO3 and the OTW at this point! I feel sad for the good people getting chewed up by the godawful organizational disaster but not sad enough I'd touch that org with ten foot pole. Aiiiiiii.

[branchandroot]

Oh my god, it's a train wreck. And the poor people, who clearly have no familiarity with coding, who are /trusting/ this line of bullshit! *shakes head*

[pineapplechild]

It's kind of a pity, because I seriously think Ao3 is one of the best archives I've used, but the organization running it seems to be a train wreck. Or a bag of cats.

[branchandroot]

I know! It drives me up the /wall/! There are some great things going, if only the management could get their heads out of their asses enough to, you know, /ask/ the users what's working and what isn't.

[mitsuhachi]

There ought to be some way to communicate with the people in charge here. Like, I refuse to believe they'd put so much time and effort into something and then KNOWINGLY put their own ego and control issues ahead of the projects basic well being. Like...can't someone call bullshit? If its that all obviously bullshit?

[branchandroot]

*shakes head* Some of the people in charge just seem to be on too much of an ego-trip to /see/ the problems, or admit them. This thing is really, really not acting like an Open Source project. And the reasonably responsible people in charge seem to have a big, ugly weight of built-up cultural expectations (like never criticize anyone and never fire anyone) in their way.

[jennyst]

"Is no longer officially supported on every possible combination of operating system" is not the same as "won't receive any help or support". I've edited to try and make that a little clearer.

Thanks for continuing to look at this - being challenged is good for us. Please do remember, though, that Dreamwidth also has some form-filling, so I don't think it's fair to ask for them to be entirely eliminated.

from the eyes of someone with much more enthusiasm than experience

[helens78]

Dreamwidth's process doesn't make you fill out a job application just to get started, though. As a potential babydev, all I had to do was go through a mostly-automated process and then ask a couple of questions in chat.

For AO3, when you go to the Volunteers & Recruiting page, it says AO3 only wants experienced devs who have worked with "developing and deploying web applications, coding within a web development framework (our teams use Ruby on Rails but experience with Python/Django is good), administering MySQL databases, and working with nginx/squid/unicorn."

Then you're asked to describe your skill level and for a time commitment, right off the bat.

Then you're supposed to fill in all the things you're experienced with, "optionally".

As a potential AO3 babydev, honestly, the combination of "we only want experienced coders" and "please promise us a time commitment right off the bat" is frighteningly off-putting. I just kinda feel like, why should I bother? Maybe I only have time to learn to write one patch. Maybe I'll get swamped by RL before I can do anything. They obviously already don't want me since I'm not experienced; there's no place for me there anyway. Why go through the process of trying to knock at the door when the answer is already "sorry, kid, we don't want you"?

IDK. Maybe it's better not to have a dozen potential babydev accounts clogging up your hosted development environments, and it's easier if you tell people "no" at the outset? If that isn't the case, though, a single checkbox in that form for "potential babydev" and eliminating the "how much time will you put in" would both be a lot more welcoming; it would send a signal that people like me could actually be of use and could actually make a contribution, even if we're not looking for a scheduled part-time job. (Part of the reason DW's development "hoops" aren't intimidating is because they're so active and friendly and crystal clear about wanting people who have never in their lives touched code, and that even patching one thing and then never being heard from again is useful and appreciated. And if RL calls, so be it.)

I will say that one thing that's heartening is that there is now an IRC option instead of just Campfire. For disability reasons I am SUPER TERRIBLE at IRC, but at least it's something I'm familiar with and can be made to run in programs that can be customized to be much, much easier for me on an ability level.

Re: from the eyes of someone with much more enthusiasm than experience

[jennyst]

When Volcom finish their revamp, all the welcoming stuff will be there again for our babydevs, too. At the moment we've closed our general recruitment, including for babydevs, to allow us to revamp our processes. We don't want to add new people if they're not going to be properly supported - we'd rather admit that up front than have people be disappointed and burn out later. The only exception is for technical experts, to help with the AO3 performance issues. That's why the form seems so off-putting.

I'll see if we can make that any clearer on the form, though - we used to have a section explaining that it was a temporary form while we sort out the new intake process, and it seems to have disappeared. And thank you for the compliment on IRC - it was a bit of a battle to get it approved and set up, and uptake has been disappointingly low, so it's good to know someone appreciates it.

Basically, we'd love to welcome people in your position again soon, but we're wary of over-promising right now, because we've let too many people down already. We want to take a few more steps to improve our volunteer retention and support structure first, rather than encouraging more babydevs to dive in the deep end at risk of drowing.

Re: from the eyes of someone with much more enthusiasm than experience

[helens78]

♥ That sounds thoughtful! I'm looking forward to seeing where this leads. I really do look at the Archive as a long-term process rather than an endpoint to a goal, you know? Like any ongoing project in development, I'm hoping there will be opportunities in the future. *fingers crossed*

[branchandroot]

You know, not once have I compared AO3 to Dreamwidth. The fact that you repeatedly have is kind of making me wonder. If we're on that subject, though, DW documentation has always made it clear to me what I was signing for, and when (that is, here's my email for the person who manages the dreamhacks, and here's my permission to license my designs under open source terms). DW as a body also sustained my initial trust, instead of grinding it into the dirt, which latter pretty much describes my experience trying to help with AO3.

Let's be honest, OTW code development and volunteering has a really big backlog of bad experience to overcome, at this point. A continuing roll of bad experience, which is reinforced every time a staffer or volunteer contacts me privately, asking me to please not name them in public, even when they're making extremely mild critiques. That's happened three times in the last month/four entries on otw. That is not the sign of a community I want to take much trouble to participate in.

So if there are no longer months of delay after filling out that form (which seems to be not entirely the case) and there are no longer mandatory training sessions or meetings for bug-shooters (god I hope not) and if I would no longer have to follow Shalott's personal roadmap (questionable)... well, those are all good things, but that's still Shalott in charge over there. The person who ignores her obligations, who has terrible commit discipline and clearly very little idea how to manage code that's updated from multiple sources, and who has, in the past, displayed appalling callousness toward volunteers in her area. These things do not encourage me to place my faith, or my time and work, into that area, or to trust that my work would be part of a reasonably well-directed and sustainable project.

Every step taken toward making OTW code more genuinely resemble an Open Source project is a good one. The github repository was a major step, and I applaud it. More open documentation would be a good next step; that kind of thing should not reside mostly on a private wiki. But there's also a lot of broken faith that needs to be addressed, publicly and with some fanfare, and hasn't been. OTW as a body, and the AO3 branch in particular, has a long row to hoe before it can claim to be level in openness or trust with a project like Wordpress. Or Calibre. Or, indeed, Dreamwidth. In the meantime, OTW is going to have to allow more access to get a similar level of willingness to even try, among the body of potential contributers, and offer some assurances that contributers will not be abused the way all too many volunteers (including those at the highest levels) have been. I really would suggest breaking the process for getting a webdev off from the Volunteering form, which has a lot of really bad associations, by now. Let whoever maintains the webdev server handle those. Open source bug-shooters really are, in general, a lot like a bunch of cats. They don't need someone to stand at the door letting them in and out. They need a cat door. It's only when it comes time to review whether that's a catnip mouse or a dead field mouse they've left you that gating needs to happen.

[bookshop]

I really would suggest breaking the process for getting a webdev off from the Volunteering form, which has a lot of really bad associations, by now.

Renay's only been VolCom chair for 6 months, and in that time as many people have noted there's been a marked improvement in response times for volunteers. It seems likely that improvement will continue.

It doesn't seem fair to insist on change in one part of the org, and then simultaneously suggest that VolCom, one of the committees in the org that's most visibly and actively working on changing, is too broken to function and should be jettisoned.

The other crucial issue here is that many, many people want Volunteers to gain the right to vote in the org. If that happens, the only way we can give them votes is to actually put them through an induction process. Which means we need VolCom.

(Disclaimer: this is a DevMemer's opinion, am not a VolComrade.)

[branchandroot]

Excuse me, but I don't believe I suggested somehow getting rid of the Volunteer committee. I suggested splitting one particular process off into the immediate care of the person most closely concerned with implementing that process. Pay attention to the actual words you just copied and pasted. Pointing out years and years of built-up bad press is not equivalent to suggesting annihilation.

[bookshop]

You're suggesting that Coding jettison the VolCom induction process. That's why I said "jettison."

[branchandroot]

*faintly disgusted* No, I did not. I suggested that the specific action of getting a /webdev/ not be required to go through the Volunteer gateway, not that all coding somehow eschew contact with the volunteer process. If you want to defend the current volunteer committee or its chair, please go find someone who's actually attacking them.

[synecdochic]

To be scrupulously fair, it's fairly uncommon in the OSS world for projects to offer a sandbox/hack/webdev/whatever-you-want-to-call-it type system -- pretty much any project on Github, you're going to need to install the code first before doing any serious patching against it and the people who frequent Github are already used to doing that kind of thing. (I believe DW was the first project of any significant size to offer that kind of setup, although I couldn't swear to it.)

That having been said, though, those projects also tend to have better install docs -- somebody I know did try to get the Archive software up and running recently and said it wouldn't have been possible without her experience. Mind you, the DW code is also a stone bitch to install and we don't have very good install docs either -- the Dreamhack service actually sprung from the fact that it was more cost-effective in terms of time, effort, and energy for us to script the install process than to try to talk everyone who wanted to hack on the code through the install, since it's the kind of thing that you need a specialized skillset for -- but we do at least handle things like dependencies gracefully and we've improved the process considerably from where it was when we forked.

In most cases it basically boils down to, it doesn't matter what programming language you're using, anything that was created as a webapp using the LAMP stack (or one of the other webdev languages like Ruby) is going to be a stone fucking bitch to get installed on a personal computer running Windows or MacOS, because the underlying setup's just so different. (Easier on MacOS, because MacOS is Unix under the hood, but easier still isn't easy; Windows, though, is always going to be really fucking hard.)

I do think there's definitely a touch of magic pixie dust thinking going on, though. Experienced developers don't just magically appear just because your project's on Github (or Sourceforge, or Ohloh, or Freshmeat/Freecode, or CPAN, or whatever OSS hub is popular at the moment) -- you have to actively recruit them, and you have to make the process of contributing pleasant, process-light, and low-effort. This is ... somewhat antithetical to the OTW's method of doing things, and I don't think the two can be reconciled.

[branchandroot]

*nods* I got started on Wordpress with a local install, but WP was /built/ for that. And had a fairly well-structured forum where you could go and beg for help. (Which help I'm kind of entertained to notice, seems to have migrated largely to Stackoverflow, but hey; whatever works.) And even so, my "local" install was on my paid webspace, not my desktop! MacOS Apache is a bitch and a half to deal with.

I wouldn't have touched a local install of LJ or DW with a ten foot pole. *laughs* I downloaded the zip for a look, once, and backed off fast. AO3 isn't actually that bad, in comparison, but the lack of documentation in any public place pretty much puts the kibosh on wanting to try an actual install. So, yeah, by that measure, "experienced", here, pretty much means "has run their own installation of a really complex app before/is an active sysadmin".

And those people are going to show up, why? Because it's so very rewarding to be an overloaded worker-bee? /heavy sarcasm. The black-box nature of the organization is really, really working against recruitment of /any/ coders.

Cat doors, people, we need cat doors installed!