Re: How can we decrease the cognitive overhead for contributors?

[Giovanni Biscuolo <g@xelera.eu>]

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Hello,

(I find it difficult to efficiently follow this thread and to keep up to
date with reading it, so please forgive me if someone else already
addressed my considerations)

Simon Tournier <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> writes:

[...]

> « For which contributors do we want to/can we decrease the cognitive
> overhead? », so I read it as: do we discuss about someone who is already
> playing guitar or someone who is knowing nothing about music.
>
> We already have the answer: we are speaking about someone who already
> plays guitar (a skilled programmer).

There are many ways to contribute to Guix:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---

- Project Management
- Art
- Documentation
- Packages
- Programming
- System Administration
- Test and Bug Reports
- Translation

--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
(https://guix.gnu.org/en/contribute/)

and just a few of them requires to be a skilled programmer :-)

But you are absolutely right, we are talking about someone who already
have:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---

(skill
 (or project-management
     user-interface-design
     graphical-design
     multimedia-design
     technical-documentation-writing
     guix-programming
     guile-programming
     program-debugging
     system-administration
     translation-of-tachnical-documents))
     
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

I'd also say that other "low level" skills are dependencies for some or
all of the above mentioned skills, like: git-dvcs-usage, text-mua-usage

As already mentioned, a conditio sine qua non (hard dependency) to
contribute to Guix (as to as many many other international distributed
projects) is to have "high level" skill named
manage-communications-in-EN.

Last but not least, a "meta skill" is that you accept to do all of this
as a volunteer in a large group of volunteers, with very few /direct/
rewards - the most important one being to improve the best ever free
software distro [1] - and many many issues to address...

Quite a lot of skills to be able to contribute, I'd say.

Furthermore, not a skill but another requirement not to be
underestimated is you need a certain amount of time and unfortunately
many people can only subtract that from their (often already scarce)
free time.

Probably we should find a way to /introduce/ old and new contributors to
this concepts since I feel someway sometimes they are forgotten or
underestimated.

[...]

> Somehow, now we have to discuss about specific task, task by task, and
> propose how to improve.  Survey is one next action for collecting
> data.

My 2 cents: surveys should be _carefully_ designed or the resulting data
would be useless at best, misleading at worst

[...]

> The improvement had been the removal of the friction by switching to
> some web interface.  Now, the process is probably not easy for people
> like me that are not used to web interface, although interacting with
> web interface is a simpler task than configuring some tools for
> editing translation files.

There is a weblate CLI we should probably package in Guix:
https://docs.weblate.org/en/latest/wlc.html

I just hope that changing from a git-commit-based approach to a
weblate-tool approach have helped find many more active translators:
https://translate.fedoraproject.org/projects/guix/#information

> we are far from the initial discussion. ;-)

Sorry: OT... OT?!? :-O

> I do not see “the practice of controlling access to information,
> advanced levels of study, elite sections of society, etc“.  Well, are
> you French? ;-) Because I feel we are discussing unrelated points
> emerging although we are agree on the core and we just detail tiny
> variations of the same thing. :-)

If you want I can add a little bit of Italian attitide at discussing in
detail tiny variations of the same thing :-O... just joking, eh! ;-)

[...]

Ciao! Gio'


[1] well, I'm biased :-D

-- 
Giovanni Biscuolo

Xelera IT Infrastructures

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