 Okay, so the session is, let's make Ddado issue picking easier, otherwise known as people want to help and they don't know what to do, and this is based off of several combinations of old wisdom and other talks by Zen Doodles and XJM, so that's nice. I'm Yassiti, I'm Kathy Thays, I'm Yassiti on Twitter, so you can tweet questions and follow up thoughts at me. I work for Black Mesh, they pay me to go to Drupal events, organize sprints and work on core issues. I mentor in IRC at the core office hours regularly, I plan sprints, I plan the Friday Sprint, which y'all should come to, and organize the extended sprints, which you're invited to, and I also work on issues and my favorite issues to work on are the multilingual ones. So what I'm going to talk about is a little bit about the experience that new people have for picking an issue or what options they have for how to know what issues to do and then show some of the things that we're trying to do to overcome that and make that process better and then we're going to discuss some ideas that you have for what we can do to improve that experience for people. So this is a core conversation and that means that the presentation part is going to be short and there's going to be a lot of discussion. So first some context, WebChick has this great talk that was recorded in Sydney and there's a particular section of it that I really like a lot that explains how the issue queue works and issue queues are really important to us and that's how we get things done. We're going to talk about how people pick issues to work on and the work that they do are various ways of contributing and contributing can mean a lot of different things like evaluating an idea and giving feedback. It can be reviewing a patch or a UX design. It can be reading an issue, summarizing things, updating the issue summary, manual testing. It can mean a lot of different things. It means uploading a patch to an issue. In general, I really want people to have a good first experience contributing so that they do it more than once and we don't have a lot of good numbers for how often people contribute but we do have numbers for how often people, how many mentions people have when they worked on a patch and it got committed. It's not the same thing as the amount of work they did. It's what we have numbers for. Drupal cores is one way of looking at that information. It analyzes the commit messages that get on issues that are fixed. There are about 2,070 people who have commit mentions in Drupal 8 right now and about half of them have only one mention. It doesn't mean they have only attempted to contribute once. They probably contributed a lot more than once because you have to contribute quite often in order to get something committed. Something has already come through fruition. It probably also means that they have several in the pipeline that could be committed by the time Drupal 8 gets released too. Anyway, we've got these numbers. This 2,000 and about half are at one. Trouble is, even to get that far, you have to figure out which issue is a good match for you, something that you are interested in, you have a good skill set that needs you and that is of important enough priority that other people will review your work and take it all the way to getting done. Finding issues like that is really difficult. Even if you find one like that, finding another one can also be difficult because clearly we have all these people who have one. We don't have all of them at two. We typically give people advice if they can have contact with somebody else in the community. We give them advice like try and pick a novice issue, don't pick things that are too old and don't pick things that are too new and look at the status and issues that maybe try and pick something that's at needs work or needs review because at least work has been started, there's something there to go off of. So already when somebody wants to get involved and contribute, we already have to give them advice for how to get started. It's important that they have a good first experience, that their work gets reviewed or feedback in order for them to gain some of the benefit of even putting all that work into an issue. The benefit is that they get reviewed, that they get feedback, that they develop their skills, that they learn something more and that the issue goes to actually getting fixed and that also requires review. We really want those first experiences to have that success of getting feedback and we have different ways of helping people do that. We have a novice tag, we have initiatives or people that are working together in groups, we have these focus boards that we use, we have tags, we tell people at Sprints to pair up and we have meta issues, we have all these things that we try and do and then when people want to get involved, we have to explain the things to them and they have to know that they have all these options of ways to finding issues and it's all just a lot. One thing that doesn't really have to be explained to them, one entry point is if they know they have a dashboard, if they make an account, if they know they have a dashboard and they go to it, they might see this thing, this contributor links block on their dashboard and they might see this link that says we have a lot of novice issues. I don't know that that's strictly obvious, that that's what they should do though and I don't know exactly what that links to but it probably doesn't link to issues that are at all targeted toward that person or that even have that criteria that we recommend, the not too old, not too new and has certain statuses that might give them a leg up. This is one entry point, if they go to the issue queue and if they go to the advanced search, then this is how they can weed down the funnel of just all of the issues in existence down to something that might work for them but they don't even know to do this. But what they can do is make sure they're looking at core, if they want to get involved, to pick whatever project and look for things that need work, need review, pick the version of things that you're interested in and then to really filter things down, you have to know about this tags thing and you have to notice that the select has to be set to is all of not because otherwise you just get more issues and really the best way for people to do this thing is to pick novice and then pick another category that gets them something that they're interested in so I'm really interested in multilingual so I would pick novice and D8MI. How do you know that the tag is D8MI? It doesn't say multilingual. What would you even type there? How do you even know that you're supposed to put a topic there? There's nothing. So there are other entry points besides that dashboard novice link. You could instead read about some awesome work that's being done and see a tweet or see somebody write a blog post and in those communications they might link to like the group's page, right? So like a focus board or a blog post or with the multilingual site, right? Do I take that picture? No, so they might go to look at what's going on with core and eventually find that we have initiatives and those initiatives might link to a site and then that site will link to a list of issues using that tag. So this is how to discover the tag, right? Like if I were interested in working on multilingual I might read a multilingual blog post or see a tweet or something which might land me, I don't know where it is, might land me here but on the front page of this site, okay? So it takes me to the multilingual website and then I might be like, oh, focus issues and then I would go here and I would see issues, right? And then on this page is a link that goes to the actual advanced search and that's how I could discover the tag. So I'd have to go through those steps. Another way of discovering tags or topics or the words that we use to describe things or issues that are related is to find any issue at all, right? Maybe by googling or something and then to look at tags that are already on an issue and be like, oh, that's how people are categorizing things. So if you find an issue that you are interested in then you can see, oh, look, something D8MI still aren't going to know what D8MI means, right? Or configuration system, right? That one's a little bit more discoverable. So we can come in through the novice and the dashboard or we can come in like through a blog post that links to a group site and then that group site links to an advanced search which includes the tag that that group uses. You could also hang out in IRC and see how other people find things, right? So some people may use factoids and this is how I keep track of things. So there's a robot that lives in IRC and it knows things, right? So sometimes when I have a question, I ask the robot and it gives me the answer. Okay, and then there are a lot of groups that have focus boards. These are sometimes made with a project called Rocket Ship. It's struple.org slash project slash rocket ship, I think works. Yeah, but I think it still has a namespace. I don't, they don't whatever it's called Rocket Ship, you can Google it because Google Rocket Ship Drupal and that will work. It is very helpful. Okay, the trauma with the Rocket Ship focus board things is they break when Drupal.org changes and it's a screen scraping thing mostly because there's no API for Drupal.org. There's an issue, a JSON issue, and this is issue number 1710850. Please. So someone at this is, this is Ryan. Hi, I'm Ryan. Somebody's actually trying to make Rocket Ship on Drupal.org at this Drupal con. Good. Is there an issue for that? I don't know what it is, but it's probably in the Rocket Ship issue queue. No, I looked I looked this morning, I couldn't find it. Can somebody find it and look at, look it up, please? All right, let's, let's see if we can find that. Okay, because I thought that there wasn't, I, I couldn't find the issue. Good, find it. See what I mean? It's hard to find issues. All right. Yeah, so let's see if we can, if we can find that. It will be easier for groups to provide ways of onboarding people when we can get this fixed though. So that will help a little bit. Okay. Right. So Boyan is asking if, if fixing the JSON thing and allowing groups to like organize their stuff helps with onboarding or helps with organizing and Jess said both. So there's kind of ways that people find issues. There's more ways that people find issues. They could be having a problem. They could run into a bug. So let's say you're trying out triple eight for the first time. And you are looking an admin table. It's a really long table. And you scroll it. And the header on the table floats into the middle of your table. And that, that annoys you because you can't do what you were doing. And you notice that that's a bug. And so you do a Google search, you know, floating header, something, something, right. And you, oh, look, there's an issue. That's your pain point. That's actually like our nicest way of somebody finding an issue that they're interested in is that they first find the problem. And then when they Google, they find the issue, because they are interested in it, right. But it may not be good for them as a novice contributor. Okay. There's, and then there's the other way, which is just the general, oh, I want to help with Drupal. And I don't know what to do. So you can either already know a bug that you want to work on, be trying to become part of a group that's working on a certain set of bugs. Or you can just be lost and just be like, I don't know what to do. So if they're lucky, when they find an issue through any of those ways, they, it might have enough to date issue summary. And that's what they're going to use to try and decide whether or not to work on the issue. So they found an issue, but there's still no like idea for them about whether or not it's a good issue for them. And if it's a good first issue for a new contributor, so we can, we do some things with the issue summary. With that, in general, just having an issue summary template, like we have been having for a long time and having it be updated, that's already helps new people evaluate the status of the issue. But we can do better than that. Sorry. In those issue summaries, we can provide links to these. This is a section of the get involved sidebar documentation area on Drupal.org. And it's relatively high in the list on the sidebar. And it's new contributor tasks. And it lists out different categories of contributor tasks. So this is another way people might come in and be able to find things to work on is they could go to the get involved. We have a whole get involved section, right? And then they might come here and they might see the contributor tasks, and then they might click on one and then go find an issue that has that task that needs to be done. Anyway, so if there's an issue and it has an issue summary, and somewhere in there, it has a link to a contributor task. This helps people identify the issue as one they could work on because it's very easy to identify what needs to be done. And if they can't figure out what needs to be done, they can't figure out if they can do it. So we want to identify the things that need to be done on issues. We have these great contributor task documents. They're superb. They're Drupal.org slash contributor dash task slash whatever like slash review or slash do accessibility review or all kinds of things. Oh, good. That's good. Okay. We have this new thing. Okay, like adds a couple of days ago that we people who use issue a lot, they have dreaded her. Hopefully, and and there's a button. There's a new button. And it says insert novice tasks. What this does is put a table, which has a template, which lists the common tasks. It lists like a short name for the task and it links off to those great contributor tasks instructions. The good thing about this for us is now y'all don't have to let Google for contributor task reroll or contributor task manual testing or contributor tasks, update issue summary. You have a button right there. You click on it and it inserts the thing and you just find the tasks that you're trying to insert and you uncomment it and then you save the issue. So doing that helps people evaluate issues to see if they are good matches for them. Because if the issue says that the things that need to be done are to add automated tests and to make a back port and that person is not a coder, then they know that is not a good issue for them and they can move on and look for a different issue. The nice thing about having the button here is this is completely discoverable, talking about discoverableness. I'm going to tell you guys about this and now you know. But I didn't have to. You guys used Redditor. You would have noticed the button eventually and maybe clicked on it to see what would happen and then you'd be like, hey, what's this contributor tasks? Oh, that's cool. And why would they be trying to tell me to put them in the issue summary? Maybe that's a good idea. So this is actually, I'm pretty happy with this. Actually, this is great because it gives our experienced contributors some discoverable way of making other issues discoverable. Oh, this is what it looks like after you save looks much nicer than the HTML. So it's kind of organized. It has a short name for task. It identifies which of the tasks are novice issues because not all issues in a novice, not all tasks in a novice issue are novice. So we can explicitly say, this is good for you, new person. These other ones don't do that. And then it has the instructions. I like a lot the idea of marking things as done or completed. Because what this does is it exposes our process to people who don't understand it. When we delete tasks from the remaining tasks section, it's not obvious that they were done. It's only obvious that they don't need to be done, which is there's a difference. Anyway, Jess did this and she did a good job. We did it together and we did a good job. Okay, so this button is good, right? Because we did it, right? Katzer did it, the dreaded her people, right? Son, Mark Carver. I said we needed it for the sprint. And they said, you know, okay, and like six of us, we made this happen. This is really incredible. And we could do it right now. We didn't need to wait on anybody. We decided it was a good idea. And we did it. But there's also the idea that this should be metadata on the actual issue. But it requires changing Drupal.org. And a while ago, Drupal.org, we couldn't change it. Before the migration from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, we didn't want to make any changes because we needed to do the migration first, otherwise we never get the migration done. Once we got the migration done, now we could start making changes. But the changes that we needed to do were the super critical ones. And so we waited for those. And also, after the migration, we needed to kind of wait for making working on Drupal.org easier. So providing, you know, a copy of Drupal.org that you can play with, right? A sanitized, truncated, you know, version of it. All these things are making it a lot easier to change Drupal.org. And there are documented ways of getting your own copy of Drupal.org. And it's only going to get easier because they have great ideas on how to make that easier to do. But it's still hard, though, to do this. So we need a stopgap and we have that. But this is the A long term vision. And we can do a lot more with this than we can with markup. Because if we want to know things about, you know, remaining tasks, and we store that information in markup, now we have to do screen scraping to get it. If we do this, right, now we can once we can do the JSON thing, right, we can make all this information available so we can do things with d.o can do things with it, but other people could do things with this information to another, right. So I think we should do this for only core. First, because otherwise, we have to convince a lot of people about changing their way they work on their project, and it will die. Right. Yes. The patch, this patch in this issue. So the issue is 2013222. And there are a bunch of screenshots in here when Jess made a mock up on her version of Drupal.org, a sandbox version, not her version. And and her her stuff is in, let's see, pound comment dash 826129. The nice thing about having issue tasks like this. Well, no, that's a side. I'll complain about that some other time. Okay, so new people need to be able to evaluate need to be able to find an issue they're interested in working on it and then evaluate whether or not it's a good match for them. Right. Once they find it, they should follow it. This works really well for new contributors, because they're following one issue or eight issues. Right. They should totally do this. This is great. Socks for us. So there's a issue to change this which has consensus last time I checked to add a second kind of follow, which is a favorite. And that one is issue 1621714. I think we should totally do that. We agree. I think there's work already. And we should just we should just do it. Okay, so the the difference between follow and favorite. So if my understanding or my imagination of what would happen is there would be two buttons, like a star and a follow button. I don't know if that's actually what's going to happen. If you start it, you would follow it. Like it would follow it for you. And then when you went to your dashboard or something, you would have two lists available to you issues that you follow and issues that are your favorite. So follow means that, well, you can configure your account to send you notifications for things that you follow. And you may want to get notifications on a lot of things. But you probably don't want to whatever on all of those, you don't want to review them all you don't want to work on them all. You don't want to be able to share a list of all of those with other people, right? There's, there's this large thing of issues that you kind of want to know about and don't want to lose. But then there are some that are more important. For whatever reason to you, maybe they're actually not your favorites, maybe they're the ones that you hate. And you want to comment every time somebody else does to make sure they don't get done, right? Like, whatever it is, you think so you but like each person kind of has at least this idea that there are a lot of things you want to know about and some of them are more important than others. So we're calling it favorite, but it means whatever it means to the person. Now, there are some people who need more fine grain splitting up than that. But there are a whole lot of people who this is good enough for them. So I think we should just do it. For people who need more different kinds of lists, there's an idea of having personal tags. So I don't know some kind of thing where you favorite it, and then there's a drop down and then you can categorize it. And then now you can have lots of lists of different things. I don't nobody thinks there's no consensus on whether or not that's a good idea. But the discussion about whether or not it's a good idea is on issue 2271877. I deal with that right now, because Gabor told me to use Gmail labels, and it works pretty good, except I can't share it with anybody. So if I tag issues that I think would be really good for the upcoming Drupal.org mentoring sprint in my Gmail, I can't share that list with anybody. I mean, I could write down put into Google. Put in a blog post, give everybody my Gmail credentials and then just let them have access. So I think this is an interesting thing. I think we could discuss it. I think there could be some advantages. And it's related to the idea that we need to take these lot ton to ton of issues, we need to make lists smaller so that they're targeted towards certain people. And then those people need to be able to find those short lists. Okay, so yes, I do. So those contributor task documents are so super. And the hook 42 blog posts that Kristen pool and Amy did on prepping for the sprint on Friday is fantastic. Everybody should go read that. Yes, that's Amy. That's Kristen. It was a community thing. There were a lot of people who looked at it and it built on a lot of information that's been around for a long time that came from a lot of different people too. So that's super fantastic. Yeah, earlier, we were talking about rocket ship. Go ahead. And and we mentioned that somebody was actually trying to kind of make that a general purpose thing that existed on dribble.org. And I think that's a really good useful thing. It right now, initiatives are kind of the ones who are making these rocket ship things, but not really initiatives, just groups of people who are coming together and they need a way to organize things. But it's not only good for people who are working on Drupal. It's good for people who are also working on Drupal.org. It can benefit that team also of being able to have this way of visualizing the issues about changing Drupal.org. Okay, so this is Ryan wheel again and the issue is called add a Kanban style view to issues page and the node ID is 2278573. So again, 2278573. Yes, bring the noisy baby in the room, please. No, and everybody smile at the baby and don't worry about the noise. Okay, so I'm going to summarize a little bit and then we're going to discuss. So in terms of the action that you all could take to kind of help with this problem, you could come to the Drupal mentoring office hours. Now, why would I tell you to do that? I'm not going to tell you to come to the office hours so that you can help new people so you can experience their pain. You could. But those office hours are not just a point at which new people gather to get involved. They're a point at which mentors gather to fix this problem. So we can go in another channel. It's on everybody's calendar. It's regular meeting, right? It's people who are interested in this thing. And if you're interested in in onboarding new people, but you don't actually want to onboard new people, that they're meeting at the times of the office hours. And if we have more mentors there that are needed to help people in IRC, because we get sometimes I do like the Monday. What's my Monday evening ones? Sometimes we get zero people. Sometimes we get one. Sometimes we get eight, right? But if there are five mentors who just come, they just come to that time all the time, when we're not busy helping new people, we can be busy solving the problem so that we don't have to help new people. So coming to the Drupal mentoring office hours is something you can do when you go back home. And you want to help with this? This is where we can, it's like a meeting. It's already scheduled. We can just meet at this time. Drupal Dash contribute, you can complain in Drupal Dash contribute, you can, you can paste links to issues that you're working on, ones that are related to this problem there and people will see you do that and then they will start talking to you and we can start working together on things. You can help with this big problem by working on any Drupal.org novice issue because the way we're going to fix this problem is not by working on Dryditor. The way we're going to fix this problem is by working on Drupal.org. But we don't know how to work on Drupal.org. We need, I mean, the people in this room, I know I'm looking out and I'm seeing 30 experienced contributors and some new ones, right? We need novice issues on Drupal.org because we have to figure out where are the instructions for how to get our own, you know, sandbox site, we have to figure out what are the processes that are specific to that. So even though that issue where it puts the needs tasks, the remaining tasks in the metadata is like super complicated and that's what I want solved. That's not where I want you to go to work. I want you to go to work and do one novice Drupal.org issue and then come and work on this really complicated one. Right? I mean, I have experience with this. It's very good to get a successful experience that's easy to do so you can learn all the annoying things before you have to really think hard conceptually about a big overarching problem. So you can actually help with that complicated issue by just working on any D.do issue, novice issue so that you can build your skills. Come to any sprint. There it's really common now that there are tables of categories of people working on things at sprints. And we have tables that are just working on Drupal.org issues at sprints. And if you're looking for a sprint, it's really great way of finding them is to go to Drupal.com. It's like tropical, but it's Drupal. Even in palm tree, logo icon. And when you're trying to find sprints, your best bet is to look for cons, camps, and sprints. Because it's kind of assumed a lot of times that a camp is going to have a sprint, they don't put in separate events. The con right there sprints all at the con. There's no sprint event. It's just the con. So when you're looking for sprints, look for those three things cons, camps and sprints. So these are things that you can do that will help with this problem. The node about getting this an actual metadata, right? That's 2103222. More information about the core mentoring stuff is at Drupal.org slash core dash mentoring. Please evaluate this session. You find the session and then you can leave your feedback. Yeah. And so that's it. So what we want to do, what I want to do, hopefully you want to do is discuss these things. So we can go back and look at slides. I can use the internet and pull up things. So if you have questions, if you disagree, if you have separate ideas, it might be helpful if somebody writes them down. Ryan, who yes, you're going to write them down. Who are you? Greg's going to write them down. So when not everybody knows everybody else. So if you ask a question, say your name. So I'm I'm Jess. I'm XJM on Drupal.org. And in the very beginning, when Kathy was talking about the novice tag and how it doesn't really link to the issues that we want, I kind of wondered actually why it never occurred to me before that we can make that a better view. We can make that a view that is I mean, the bare minimum simple thing we can do is it instead of it being 1244 issues across everything, we can make it targeted, you know, to to we have a bunch of core links there have have one that's targeted to core limit the creation date limit the comment number is actually the number one thing that I would say, if the issue is over 40 comments long, do not put it in there. That's that's the kind of thing that we have a whole API for the the only thing I think that is difficult about that is that to build that view on Drupal.org, it has to be a search API view, which defeated me actually the last time that I tried to create a Drupal.org view. But someone else who has more patience or who has more experience setting up the amazing UI that search API has could probably do that pretty easily. So if there's someone who's like, I want to make it easier to find novice tasks, you should file that issue to make the novice view better. That's on the dashboard link and tell Kathy and I about it, right, we can give you. Yeah, so I think that's an action item that we can take out of here. This is clearly something that needs to be done. And what we need to do is open the issue. And then I can tweet out the issue. And we'll tweet it out from Drupal mentoring to. So you can follow me sct or you can follow Drupal mentoring. And we'll let people know that way. Oh, and we could also put in the comments section on the talk on the con website. And then so I have three things. Good. The second thing the second thing that I thought of like right away then is that so so the the fact that people don't know like when you're saying I don't know what to choose two tags and search for them together, I don't know how to find like I have to go out to the contributor tasks document and then it gives me some instructions. And then I go back in and how do I go through that process. So it's it's what when you go to a website, people have these like these like goal oriented links, like you would say, I want to try creating a new patch on like a novice, a novice landing page or some area when you click novice, it could take you to more than a view that says, I want to try creating a new patch, you click that and it gives you only the active issues that are actionable for patches. Or you could say I want to try testing something and and then it gives you a link to the needs manual testing ones and again, the contributor tasks document for that is there. So that so that is the new that is the contributor tasks page. So you might be saying that so we have another option for that novice link on the dashboard or something, which is not to take people to issues. Well, where the heck isn't I think it should do both. I mean, think about when you when you want when you look for information here. So this page, right? If you land here, what this page is it's I'm sorry about the resolution. Alright, but it's a little description about why you would want to contribute it all. And then there's a long list at the bottom here we edited this and actually put each task because they were hidden under the parents over there. So you can come here and you can immediately scan the page and you can be like manual testing. That's a thing I can do. Like you don't even know what the things you can do are that that we value, right? This exposes those things on this page. And these links go to documents that say how to find issues to do this thing. This is great process here. So I'm not quite sure what what I'm saying is different than this. What I'm saying is when I click on the new contributor to task document for manual testing, the view should also be there. Right? Like when you go to a web page in the modern world, you have different blocks of contextually related information. So I should have a list of issues with the instructions for how to do the issues. But like it wouldn't you you wouldn't want to overwhelm the user with all of this information once you have like when you click on novice, you have like a little like teaser section that sort of introduces them like I want to try this thing and then it can guide them through the process. Yeah, we'd have to craft. We'd have to think about that. I know. So that's another so that's an issue. I would say it's an issue because we want to discuss it. So it's not an issue like like it's a bug that we have to file or we have to create a meta issue. Probably I we could put it in with the we could put it in with the Drupal mentoring on D dot Oh, yeah, maybe. And it would be to on the individual contributor task document pages also include a preview of issues that meet that criteria around and say introduce a new interface that includes both instructions and issues introduce a new interface that includes the instructions and issues. The handbook isn't where I go to find issues. But issues aren't where I find out how to do issues and I don't know there's no connection. Okay. And then the other thing you could also do if if if you think about that model is like I am interested in multilingual takes you to whatever reads in that. That's the kind of thing that we would have to wear a manly. There's no way to automatically do that. But if we could have a short list of those topics that for a core release cycle we identify and promote to some some area on the dashboard. I am interested in think about it multilingual click on it takes you to the page for multilingual issues that has the right and now and now and now we're at topic pages again because because these are things that need to be done for all for all of those interest areas right it would be like multilingual is an interest area right and having a on boarding link for each interest area which might not go to the same thing might not always be a link to issues it might not be a link to documentation it could be a link to a complete another site right but there's some kind of thing which groups right every group is going to want to do which is like how to get you know so yes so can you restate that last thing again. Oh just I am interested in multilingual I am interested in configuration oh exposing the topics that you can be interested in and but I think you know that that's something that well both of these are like we need to curate the concepts yes but we can that's the kind of thing that could easily go in a dashboard block. So that's our third actionable thing would be to make a curated list of interest areas. Yes and then use that somehow on the user in the user like initial user landing page experience the other thing I said it's not really actionable but like when you're talking about I don't know what you want to do it's like well no I actually should I want to say like oh we should use Aquialift. I work for Aquialift by the way did you see how I worked that in there okay. Targeting personalization and targeting for people based on their their previous work on Drupal. That's not something that we're going to accomplish this year I was mostly just joking. But then so just the other two quick things so Alex actually hold on a second so I do this thing and Jess clearly also does this thing which is when we think of things we want to share with the room we write them down please y'all people standing in line or sitting there please write your thoughts down because I I don't I don't I want to hear them whether we get to them all in the talk or we hear them later please write them down. This is why I'm holding my laptop like an awesome person. So the second Alex leaned over and asked me when we were when you were demoing the the new insert novice tasks buttons yes for the table he'd like leaned over and he said well why doesn't it automatically add the novice tag to the field and what I said was ah but it's not all novice right but we don't see that but that okay so there's a problem there I'm gonna say why I think it shouldn't be I'm gonna yes frankly it should be I don't think so but what we could do there is see this is just terrible this is the worst idea but sometimes you have to say the worst ideas right so we have this template and it says what to do it says uncomment the things what it should have in there maybe is have a link to where we explain what is novice and what isn't right in the time that should be we have a great documentation page should be a link to know inside the template right in the template the thing the experienced person is using what is it should give them the information they need to decide whether or not it should be novice and then they can know whether how then they know when not to put novice so the reason that I don't think it should add the tag automatically is that I and actually the label of the button isn't quite right it's insert tasks yeah we didn't make shed the label the but yeah I don't agree with it but I but the reason the reason is that there there is a very strong advantage to having the same format of it of information on every single issue because that makes the issue scannable so I as someone who gets used to looking at issues a few time knows that I can go to this shape on the page there's this rectangle this table I always go there it's very visible it's under a header there's it's semantic and I go there and that's what it tells me what I need to do with the issue and having that be the same for novices and non novices teaches them how to work on issues so we should be using it when we standardize on a format for telling people what the tasks are the issues it should be the same for novices and non novices and right now the dreaded buttons the best way we have of doing that and so great people should also use it on their issues that are not right so this is a soup I mean that's it's really good feedback and it's also super important so the way that you add screenshots to an issue is the same whether or not adding screenshots to the issue is novice or advanced some multilingual issues the way to step through the steps to reproduce to get to the page that you need to take a screenshot of are really hard to do and I would not give an issue like that to a novice but I will still put the link to the contribution doc for how to do it so that when an experienced person comes to the issue who may not you know have put screenshots on the issue before or you know whatever like they can still discover the information so it's definitely like the same task but some of them are hard some of them are easy but it's still the same task yeah my name is Kristen pole and I just want to share a little bit about what happened on Monday because we had sprints on Monday and I we have three new people that are this is their first triple con so three new people from hook 42 from my company yeah so I was like okay I need to find something for you guys you know we set up computers and stuff and I was like okay I need to figure out what to give you guys and I didn't know what to do I I was like I know there's a novice issue link somewhere and I was looking I swear I couldn't find it I was looking and was like I'm going home page I went to the Drupal you know page and I'm like really I mean I can't find it and I'm like well I'll just go to Gabor site and I'll go and I know how to get it from there and it was really just amazing that I mean I've fixed stuff myself and I've found issues myself but I just felt so flustered that I couldn't just like oh yeah you just go here you know so whatever but I was I would so basically yes we need to we need to fix it I there's lots of great ideas how to fix it right yeah so even as somebody like experience who's mentored before yeah right yeah you know it's hard hi I'm Danny hi Danny hi so the question that I keep bubbling so first of all I want to agree with Jess that the idea that I mean one of the things that bubbled up in the session that we were doing yesterday was the idea of being able to sort of define what you're interested in and then having Drupal org and and GDO and all of these things sort of bubble that content up to you that's something that you know on the community tools team so I'm the UX lead of the community tools team for the record but one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot is you know we have all this stuff that's sort of thrown at us and how do we basically like say this is the stuff I want but one of the things that I'm hearing in the conversation that that just happened and has been having happening for the last couple minutes is you know how do we define novice what is a novice so hold on a second I think this is this would actually be okay to do hold on what the heck is it called because yeah okay hold on yeah this is yeah this is how people so core mentoring right but here what this let's do this Drupal core I'm going to pretend it's not in my browser cache mentoring that's how I find things I just figures that are all in my browser cache oh okay okay there are some child pages down here so one of the things we've been doing is trying to really organize some of this exclusive mentor knowledge and make it more just like knowledge that people need you know for Drupal.org we've been moving it and reorganizing it and this is the same thing like that we were talking about with the preparing for the sprints blog post it's so great it's really like a redistillation of a lot of information that's had a lot of different versions and it's just they're getting better crafted all the time so what makes a good novice task is a good novice task has clear steps and is not open-ended keeps the scope specific the person is able to understand the concepts and then what makes a bad novice issue re-rolls of large patches patches that touch a lot of files issue summaries with too many comments or emotional histories or ones that have gone in too many different directions upgrade path tests issues to avoid avoid urgent ones long ones contentious ones those lacking consensus reopened derailed or those that are shifting direction so this is how we know what a novice like novice issues novice tasks this is how we know what they are so so and and that's great but what I'm trying to get at is one of the things that I heard in your talk was you said novice and then you said non-coder and well but but do I say the words non-coder because I did I'm going to kick well no but so so and there's contributor it's not it's not a can it's not a criticism it's just it's an observation so one of the things that when we think of the word novice it I'm inexperienced no no no no right so us hold on a second please tell me please tell me you know it's in the blog post it's not on here there is it's in the blog post and the blog I'm telling you the blog post is fantastic it literally has a section that is who are novices and in it it is it explains that novices are people who either in their passion or their job are have exceptional skill with what they do and what they are lacking is experience on Drupal org issues it's not that they don't know how to do fantastic things it's just they don't they haven't worked on an issue before and and and I understand that I just you know for me the question that I always come up with is well I'm not necessarily a coder but I could work on issues and there are novice issues that require code and novice is novice issues that don't require code right and how do I balance that no that those are not categories that we have so what happens when a non-coder wants to contribute no so what you do okay let's say you come to the new contributor tasks you're a new contributor see it doesn't say new coder it doesn't say right new developer it says new contributor that's very broad and then here we can find them so there are things like adding screenshots to a Drupal issue, triaging an issue, documenting steps to reproduce, manually testing accessibility, manually testing a patch, verifying an issue and right so and then there are other things you know things that so these go to issues that there's something to do on that you don't need to have all of the skills for like for example I can't do performance profiling right I can do other things but I can't do that so I know not to go look at that link so I'm hoping that people any contributor can come to this list and identify something that they see that they would be well suited for so if we're missing that from this list we need to fix that okay but the but these are not targeted to to I mean they're on purpose supposed to be inclusive is what I'm trying to say and I'm and the question is not I'm let's rephrase yes let's let's take a moment it's more stepping back and thinking about what is the word novice mean like that that's kind of what I'm getting at it's less about like are you guys being inclusive because I do believe that you are but when we hear the word novice task that means different things to different people and so when I go to Drupal.org as a novice right you might mean you might think that you're not novice exactly exactly but I know that a novice issue is good for experts you you want to do one first right experts want to do one novice issue first and then they go crazy yeah and yeah I don't know how to yeah can you imagine changing the word novice yeah well that would be a huge that would be a huge yeah yeah and it's kind of a large and it's sort of one of those larger conversations and I think what it comes down to is like even if you look on Drupal.org and you look at your dashboard there's what 7d 500 novice tasks or something last time I looked so even that like there's a number there's a huge number and how am I gonna find the one thing that I can work on from that huge number so I don't think the problem is necessarily the word novice it's how do we explain what a novice issue is like right there when you're in the moment of thinking about I want to work on an issue so yeah so I mean what we're talking about like this is all fantastic content but it's like over here where you need to look for it right yes it's just terrible disorganized and it's a lot of different places the question is sort of like you know it comes down to how do I as someone who has a couple of hours and wants to spend it doing contrib how do I find the things this is what I'm good at these things and then how do I find okay so that's awesome here's issues related to that and it's sort of like the experience for example that that I saw on Sunday where people were walking into the sprint I happened to be in the middle of the aisle and I saw people looking confused and I said oh hi are you looking for something to do let me introduce you to Kathy and then you very sweetly said okay so what are you good at what do you like doing okay so there's this table over here you should go talk to these people like can we create and this is sort of a bigger question can we create that experience on triple dot org and I wonder where that goes so I just wanted to like put that out there that would be hilarious you know it'd be like super super funny would be to like have like some student or something like follow me around and like write down how the interactions go and the words and stuff and then try and figure out how to distill that into some kind of static existence of something dude I need an assistant so bad Alina Alina that's awesome okay wait let's do that okay next just I'll try be as quick as I can technically I don't we have we have yes we have three minutes but that doesn't mean you I'm not going anywhere okay Kathy is not as hard as it sounds but we could you have to leverage Drupal be a lot smarter about it yes Mike has some issues that try and do some of these things yes you do have a lot of issues but he has some that might actually have productive ideas in them also and some that are bullshit yeah that's okay so like you're the one with the things on the side right like this issue is in needs work these are the kinds of things that need to happen after needs work yes so go ahead and say what you want to say just Kathy thank you yes a lot of great ideas it's really good to have this presentation as part of core conversations first concern there are a lot of people here and why aren't there a lot of people here I think that this is something where let Drupal is driven by by the community this is a critical issue where that we're a community failing and if our community is not able to grow and bring more people into the community in a scalable what fashion then we're not going to be able to to continue to go up into to meet the demands of the of coding for Drupal dot org all of the effort yeah the code don't leave with those notes no take a picture of them and tweet them at me before you leave the room please give them to Kristen nope I appreciate you doing it very very much and I value it so much that I'm not willing to risk losing it thank you for taking those notes so so I agree like sometimes it can feel frustrating to feel really passionate about something like I feel like you feel about this and you look around the room in the room is in full but I would disagree with maybe evaluating that there aren't a lot of people here there are a lot more people here than I thought we're going to be here and I will say the quality of people here is exceptionally good we have people who are UX experts community experts we have some new people in the room who can provide their perspective about three minutes I gotta talk gotta cover points quick quick okay yes sorry Kathy d.do contributions are very hard as a core maintainer I think it's harder to get changes in Drupal dot org and to bring people up to speed with Drupal dot org than it is in core oh yeah so you know that's a major issue there but we're working on that though and there's very little or no recognition of people who are giving their work to D.do there's no reason for people to go off and to donate or contribute to D.do because everyone's recognized we're getting core yes it's traditionally that that might have been true I think one of the nice things I keep saying this because I really think it when the when the this week in Drupal core started coming out right and we're starting as a community to realize that it is extremely important to recognize and celebrate when we do things even when the list of things we need to do are quite large we need to take time to recognize and celebrate these things and this week in Drupal core does that it recognizes when things get done and then it mentions a few little things that are coming up that we might want to be working on right Gabor does that too and D.do is starting to do that also and I think that's one way we're where we're going to start seeing that kind of recognition come through and it's important I think we need to do it I think we're starting we need to see progress on simple issues like there's some stupid simple issues on D.do like you know images on community pages like it's so trivial yeah and they're working really hard to try and make it easier for people to do it they're continually improving the sandbox process and it's not trying to slide the people who are in the Drupal association okay so wait what's your do you have a like a like a recommendation like what do you want what's your idea that the recommendation is that go out of the way because you know but I've talked for a while is that we have to start treating D.do issues at a different level or a different kind of way we have to treat it differently that we do core API changes but right now we're dealing with the same attitude with well that that they it's it's like with images on the contributing on the community pages that should be changed every few months it should be easy to get new images up there it should be a simple process somebody goes oh wait okay so let me think let me think so there's a there's a couple of different some D.do issues are really hard and they're going to take like six months a year three months to do some of them are easy wins so I think I've heard the the some on the Drupal software working group one of the governance groups and so I I get to like over here people talk about things more than I used to and I have heard them say that they are planning on allocating their time specifically splitting it between super hard issues and easy wins so we're going to start seeing more of those easy wins come through which will keep up our morale which will support getting new people involved because new people can work on those which will get reviewed by the experienced people because some of their time there will be on purpose spending on those easy wins so I think you're going to like that okay thank you Kathy sure say your name please hi my name is Sean Morris can you hear me yes um you mentioned earlier that this kind of issue management would be difficult to apply to other open source projects and that if you try to promote that that this project might even not uh this methodology might not work uh what would be the roadblocks and doing something like that um can you restate that yeah earlier you said that um at this type of it if you were to ask other people to restructure their projects to fit this issue management model then it wouldn't be easy for them at all and that this might not survive why oh okay so one of the ideas so the needs we have these needs tags we have needs tags and we have these contributor task documents so core has what's called core gates and issues are not supposed to be committed unless they meet some minimum standards and the minimum standards include uh documentation accessibility performance usability and testing thank you so we so they actually like core issues can should not be we would like them not to be committed unless they meet those things uh and so we've kind of established these things that they need to be done and these are certain things that need to be done contrib projects contrib maintainers can establish their own criteria they may have additional needs ones or they may not have these same needs um they could have more stringent less stringent different ones and so to give them this you know from on high prescription about how they need to run their issue queue is very heavy-handed and not compassionate or understanding to what those um maintainers of contrib projects so contrib projects within Drupal yeah right um so some little projects are you know hobbyists some are ones that shops run for their own usage um maintain it mostly for that but they put them up there other ones are used by tons of people like the rules module is used by a lot of people right so they're all going to have these different criteria and they're not going to be the same as the core gates so that's what i mean i don't mean that this wouldn't be useful for contrib i mean we can't we can't make it exactly like we want for core and then make all the contrib people use it i think in order to make it useful for contrib it has to be configurable per per project so that the maintainer of that project can say these are our contributor task documents these are our needs tags these are our needs you know concepts and then the idea of doing this and having it automatically go in the issue summaries and having it you know revealed what needs to be done that's useful across contrib but the specifics aren't and to prescribe a particular workflow for a different project it's rude yeah and i don't want to be rude that does make a lot of sense thank you so i'm sorry i i think i meant to come back to that during it and i just forgot so i'm really glad you asked that thank you hi my name is arena zaks i'm triple developer and femur and trainer and community person and for many years i tried to make contribution to drupal.org and i faced all these issues and i think that the biggest part that is lacking here is treating people who come to drupal.org to contribute as your standard users i don't think the user experience of these people is being considered by those who built drupal.org we all deliver websites to our customers and i don't think anybody will deliver website with this kind of navigation flow usability or anything yes it's embarrassing i think it's very embarrassing i'll be happy to donate my time as a person who does like systems and like websites designs theming i'll be happy to donate my time during this drupal corner at any other time to create quick wireframes that would say this is your landing page select novice this this this is things that i need in the right toolbar that's what i need in the middle please don't put 157 comments yes right so my i can give my drupal name and i know yes we should um we should like um we should tweet at each other or you know write things down or something i don't tweet uh then i use irc and email good irc yes please say hi to me in irc leave me a tell that is that would be the most excellent it's fine you don't have to tweet at me but leave me a tell now so let me i think in the past we have in general since the past we have changed the way that we view new contributors uh as incredibly valuable not only as a source of people who can do work but also um because they have a perspective that we lack uh and the problem with making changes to drupal.org is we weren't allowed to make them there were many reasons we couldn't we we just couldn't and those have been remedied uh in part or fully and things are getting a lot lot better but during the time with which we couldn't change things as much as we wanted we came up with a lot of good ideas about how things should be with prairie initiative we had usability studies we had past things we can go back and learn from and we have a new fresh reevaluation happening right now there are people being interviewed at the con right yes uh yes there are people being interviewed now at the con about how they use drupal.org so we can see how they use it about how they want to use it and and so we are doing those things and i i'm i tell you it's going to get a lot better a lot faster people are understand that when you give money to the drupal association they can do good things with it now they can do really good things with it now and and fixing this is something they can do hi alex pot um just want to make a quick point is that we we seem to be saying that we've got a big problem here and whilst it's great that we address the problem we're not celebrating our success jucelate has over two thousand contributors that's more than any other version of drupal. okay so yes you're absolutely right we onboard new people really well we are good at getting like if you come to office hours you will contribute to drupal right you come to a sprint you will contribute to drupal right so we we're doing it i just don't like the way we're doing it it's intensive in part on me says the person who used to do this so i mean so that's why like i'm selfishly talking to people about this and part to relieve some of that so we are doing a great job at it right but i think it could be it could it could be better we could enable more people to help other people by making some changes uh yes so i thank you we have to find ideas at scale right we have to find things that you don't scale we'd love you to scale but you don't right now we're scaling with humans i scale we have like we're gonna have like 75 mentors right and we're scaling but we're scaling without using technology we should use technology i mean we should also have humans involved like i like humans okay they they add value humans add value to the interaction but we are um we can change the proportion with which we rely on humans versus rely on technology to make the experience that those humans have better also to kathy's point when she talks about scaling humans and we have is it 75 for awesome that's awesome i i haven't counted so that anyways almost for me that's the real sustainability problem is taking that that manual taking the manual labor out of being a mentor and turning it into something that you can do that's interacting with people and sharing what you love with them instead of it being a you have to teach them a process for using a website that i think is there yeah we want to have interactions with each other they are really valuable and it's one of the great things i think people enjoy about it and i don't necessarily think that fixing this would reduce the interactions we have with each other but it would reduce how we interact with each other so we wouldn't have to be interacting on all of this we could be interacting on actually doing the thing that is the contribution instead of interacting about how you find what to contribute about so i think like you know it's complicated lucas hi hey you got my name right i will never ever ever get it wrong again i am yes but i didn't remember either earlier i'm so sorry so um yeah i mean just to to follow on with just there it's it's really hard to find stuff i went to the session today and i've been mentoring now for what seems like a year because it's been about a year yeah and and we had all these people in there that we're going to help out on friday and we're going to get them up to speed and and and and it was dear in the headlights 25 people in this room and sort of like filter out and and and and and it was not so bad as that but i felt like i felt their pain these are all folks that want to help but they're not really sure how to find novice tickets themselves and they've been contributing to core and theory for a while because now they're going to be mentoring people yeah um it's it's not easy for them and and then after an hour um you know we have people leave and and they've done one ticket where they picked it up and they said okay i'll try to look through it and see if i can get this one ticket