How would you provide specific help to open-source projects?

[duracellko]

Question

Sometimes (and maybe even more often) open-source requires help with specific skills, which are not part of the core domain of the project. For example setup CI/CD, implement Roslyn analyzers for better guidance, structure documentation, or simple documentation proof-reading.

How would you support projects, so that they can get help with such requests? And vice versa, how would you encourage projects to ask for help?

Background / More Information

Several candidates have similar support in their statements. I am curious if there are any specific ideas or actions.

[jguadagno]

I think the biggest thing to help is visibility. There are a lot of great projects out there that could use help. I think the simplest thing to do is to use our collective voices and the reach of the .NET foundation and it candidates/board to help spread the work and ask.

[SeanKilleen]

Thanks for the question, @duracellko! Tagging @dotnet-foundation/candidates so they're aware aware this question has been asked.

[mitchelsellers]

There are many resources available as part of the .net foundation so I think step one is making it easier to discover all that is available.

Further to the question though regarding technical needs. For example it is great to have Azure DevOps however of the team doesn’t have experience with CI/CD it can be hard to get started. To this point I hope we can start to collect and project “skills needed” type requests to the members. Helping to align those with the skill sets and desire to be involved with those needing assistance.

[schneidenbach]

Echoing @jguadagno's sentiments - using our networks to get the word out has always been effective to getting the right eyes on a specific project to get them the right help. The .NET Foundation already provides support to open source projects in non-technical areas (legal, for example) so I would expect to continue that as it's a huge value-add for technical minded folks who aren't lawyers (e.g. most of us 🙂)

There's another component to open source that's related to your question - oftentimes people want to contribute to open source but don't know where to start. I think there's room for a foundation-sponsored initiative to connect people who need help with their open source projects with people who want to help. Such an initiative would be a great way to help connect people and encourage a culture of collaboration.

[jskeet]

I can read the question in two different ways. I want to be clear that if I'm elected to the board, that probably means I'll have less time to spend providing specific technical help. However, I hope I'd be able to help raise visibility as @jguadagno said earlier.

On a different tack, I'd like to help by reducing the amount of work Open Source projects need to do themselves anyway. Working on Noda Time and the Google Cloud .NET Client Libraries, I've found a lot of areas where I felt I shouldn't need to build my own tools in the repo, but I haven't found what I need elsewhere in the community. (These have largely been around documentation and versioning, but not just those.) This is something I'd like to address, following a rough plan of:

• Discover and record the needs, both from my own experience and asking the community
• Find what existing projects there are which might provide at least part of the answer
• Provide support and encouragement to either give existing projects more visibility, or encourage them to join forces
• Where there really aren't any existing projects attempting to fill the gap, try to encourage the community to start one up

[SeanKilleen]

I think part of this question is difficult to answer for me because I believe the appropriate first step is to try to more fully understand what type of specific help is asked for and needed, which I think we should undertake quickly once we get started. That's one of the reasons I that I'm suggesting understanding user types and implementing some form of impact mapping as part of some first actions the board could take. (You'll find some other specific ideas there too)

With that said, I think there are a few specific ideas that could help us accomplish support for some of the examples you've provided:

• A one-stop-shop "on-boarding guide" of sorts for various stakeholders. Are you a dev who wants to get started in open source? We should be able to provide resources for you to learn what it's about, jump in, and find projects that could use your help (linking to the community when guides exist rather than creating our own unnecessarily). Are you a company that uses .NET? We should be able to on-board you to ways you can support the projects you depend on. Are you the maintainer of an OSS project? We should be able to provide you a place that lays out exactly the kind of support we can offer, and how we can request it. Standardizing these kinds of requests can go a long way to figuring out how we can support them. Someone should be able to use the .NET Foundation as a "bat signal" that they can turn to when they need something for .NET and OSS.
• A "marketplace of needs" related to the Foundation could help here, particularly for Foundation members looking to be more involved. Folks should be able to say what they think they can help with, and maintainers or the Foundation should be able to surface needs. My hope here is that the Foundation can be a good broker for keeping this marketplace of needs vibrant. Maintaining something like this would also allow us to see larger themes of needs and address them in various ways that might help -- a twitch session focused on CI/CD, pairing with devs who are new to OSS but want to contribute, a "hackathon of love" to support a project whose maintainer is feeling burned out, etc.

I believe the primary mission of the Foundation is to serve as "multiplier" -- for members looking to make a difference, for projects that are looking for support, and for positive ways to showcase and share the great work of the .NET community.

[schneidenbach]

@SeanKilleen love your "multiplier" moniker - that's a powerful concept that I think embodies the vision I have for the Foundation as a whole.

[robertmclaws]

First off, I love all the responses here. I think there is a lot of energy and passion here and a lot of great ideas.

The first thing I would do is recognize that burnout in OSS is a real, legitimate, and very common thing. I have been a part of too many organizations where new blood went full-tilt into tons of new ideas, and none of them ever got fully finished because the last 10% is 90% of the effort. Our members have lives and need to eat, sleep, have other hobbies, and spend time with family. So if we're going to be the beacon of OSS for the .NET Community, the first thing we must do is draft a set of guidance for maintaining a healthy balance while managing an OSS project.

Second, I think we can all agree that the foundation needs a Member Directory that is searchable based on projects, focus areas, and availability. That directory should let members specify which projects members are already working on, and gently warn people when they are making new commitments outside some healthy time boundary... the last thing we want is for our members to be stretched too thin. That Directory could then have a matching function, which would match specific, time-limited requests (like code and documentation reviews) with experts that can assist.

Third, I would suggest implementing a series of weekly webcasts, rotating through Foundation members and talking about various topics. Could be around project architecture guidance, unit testing, CI/CD, fundamentals of NuGet packaging, etc. Those resulting videos could then become part of a larger body of written guidance around OSS project management that would be developed over time.

Fourth, I would suggest the team start working on a repository of templates that would help with common architecture issues, possibly involving contributions to the NRepo tool. For example, the ASP.NET Core team has a great Directory.Build.props file that provides consistency for their builds. I've created a simplified and enhanced version that registers Roslyn Analyzers automatically based on project naming conventions, and disables certain complier warnings that are irrelevant in certain circumstances (like "underscore in function names" warnings in Test projects). It's highly useful in projects that ship multiple NuGet packages, and I'm sure a generator of some sort would be a big help to others. I could see us creating VS solution templates, DocFX templates, or build a new version of NuDoq, since that project has been abandoned.

Finally, I would suggest a streamlined way to help this whole process make money for people. Just because the code is free doesn't mean everything else should be. The Foundation should facilitate ways to help the community build businesses around their expertise. Creating frameworks for tiered support levels, building out common contributions infrastructure, or creating a marketplace for billable expert consulting are all ways that strengthen the community by making it financially sustainable. Everyone needs to be able to eat and feed their families, and the support we provide shouldn't just be through code.

I think there is enough expertise between all of the membership that this could be diviied up, managed, and implemented in a sustainable way.

[clairernovotny]

I have been active in helping projects onboard to the Foundation and add any CI/CD they require. This has been AppVeyor in the past and more recently Azure Pipelines.

I also run the Foundations code signing service and help projects add code signing support into their build and release processes if they desire.

[Ant-hem]

So many good ideas here, especially for the visibility.

I would love to help .NET open-source projects by providing them a great search experience for their documentation. I am working at Algolia (search technology) and we are providing to 900+ open-source projects a search for their documentation for free. We are supporting the doc search of popular frameworks such as: React, Bootstrap, Vue...

Having a great documentation for a project is one of the key to raise visibility and a strong user base. I would be very happy to bootstrap this project with the foundation.

[Mpdreamz]

How would you support projects, so that they can get help with such requests? And vice versa, how would you encourage projects to ask for help?

I would love it if we could somehow change that you in the original ask to we. As all in of the .NET foundation member collective. Setting up working groups around different topics that continuously work on best practices driven from experience. We could use these best practices to augment: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/library-guidance/

Currently the forums are very organizationally oriented: https://forums.dotnetfoundation.org but would love to include or create a separate forum for these working groups to self organize and receive questions.

[LuceCarter]

So my answer will echo a lot of the answers already given I think but I think the first step is definitely to establish what kind of help is needed.
I mentioned in my campaign statement that I want to help put together documentation that helps with tips and tricks for contributing to OSS. This could expand to cover other kinds of issues with helpful links.
For example when it comes to CI/CD, if Azure is an appropriate solution, there could be links for Microsoft Learn explaining how to get started with DevOps.
I think more focus needs to be on visiblity and connecting people across the world. I like the idea that @robertmclaws mentioned about a searchable directory.
Here in the UK we have an app called Community Connect where people can add themselves as a speaker or go to find speakers in a specific area.
Something similar could work for helping find people who might be worth connecting with to help on a project.

[IEvangelist]

This is another great question @duracellko, thank you for this. I think of this a few different ways, first most open source developers are usually already part of this community and it is somewhat difficult to add value within an existing project. Right, so in one scenario we have a seasoned developer who is an expert in their language, platform, etc... easing into an existing project is presumably seamless. There are still other concerns though, such as the domain knowledge. Building on a pillar of transparency and collaborative communication, it means working together, it means supporting one another, it means encouraging others and not being dismissive or talking down to others. It fosters the notion of equality.

On the flip-side there is the concern of trust, how does a junior develop get involved - how can we as a community build opportunities for collaboration and growth. This makes me think of the efforts around hacktober, and the various tags such as "up-for-grabs" which encourage anyone and everyone to contribute. I think it is odd that hacktober only occurs for one month a year. This should live on indefinitely 👍!

How would you support projects, so that they can get help with pull requests?

Perhaps there should be open source ambassadors, people who focus on pull requests... they offer up thoughtful critique and cater to education. I'm not saying that this is something that would happen immediately, but it is easy to imagine.

How would you encourage projects to ask for help?

I think this one is easy as if you're an open source developer they want your help, this is one of the reasons it is open source in the first place.