The recent discussions about contributions budget have shown that we are currently not measuring our contributed time very well. And since we are discussing time commitments at the community level, it’s important to start to get more reliable figures for it.
We use the “CoreContributor” tag rather than a specific account, as that time can be provided by different budgets, either internal ones or billable. Currently though, we usually only tag the non-billable “contribution” tickets (ie work sponsored purely by OpenCraft) and the upstream reviews done by core contributors. We leave aside the largest part of our contributions, namely the client work that we contribute upstream - so we will need to go back and properly tag the tickets done over the last year, to include the full range of work that is part of the core contributor scope:
The definition for Core Contributors work is:
- any scope of work described by an open ticket or pull request on the Open edX github organization (…)
- Participating in the official forum & Slack
- Tending the official wiki
- Attending the working groups meetings (…)
- Work on Tutor (…)
- Conference talk preparation
Note that this include work done by non-core contributors, as long as it matches this definition. And all work done on tasks that are contributed upstream counts, not just the additional work necessary to have it merged upstream – when we work on something that we contribute, it qualifies.
So there are a few next steps on this:
- Update our handbook and our processes to ensure that we properly identify and tag tasks that qualify, going forward – and keep an eye on the numbers as part of MNG-2649.
- Create tasks for the whole team, to have everyone spend 30 minutes going through their tasks since the beginning of 2024 to tag the ones that qualify
- Report on the overall result for 2024 and the beginning of 2025, to get an idea of the exact amount of work/time we currently contribute.
Would anyone be willing to take on this mini-epic? This can be a dedicated additional budget, to add to the contribution account.