QtCS2018 Nurturing the Qt community

Hosts: Kai koehne, Samuel Gaist

Notes: Jani Heikkinen

• Size of asset is increased. Qt 4 there were ~ 31960 files, now more than 2 times bigger!
• Amount of contributors is stable or even going down (at least not growing)
  • Starting to contribute seems to be hard (setting up gerrit, social and techical barriers (Is my change really needed in Qt, am I competent enough to do contribution), CLA)
  • We need better documentation how to start (e.g no need to clone and compile whole Qt5, one submodule is usually enough)
  • Sometimes some review comments etc can be/feel rude and that may cause first commit to be last as well
  • Getting reviews/approvals is hard if implementing something which isn't that urgent for reviewer
• Why to contribute?
  • Fix a bug
  • Implement a new feature
  • Get glory/recognition?

How to welcome newcomer/keep old ones:

• be nice (thanks for contributions, explain why bug report is ingoned/invalid/not fixed etc)
• Especially for newcomers we could accept changes more easily & ask to do follow-up task with proposed improvements? Sometimes we are requiring too perfect solution...

How to encourage to contribute

• Name contributors in release blog/web page etc
• Mentoring
• Activating people (blog comments, discussions etc).
• Increase knowledge about permission to fail
  • No-one can know all affecting platforms, use cases etc; we have a CI for that. So you can try to contribute even you don't be familiar with all affecting platforms/use cases
• CI pre-check? Even before manual review...
• Make access to CI machine/image easier...