Re: Surveying new package maintainers about their experience of contributing to Debian

On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 2:05 PM, Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@debian.org> wrote

Of course, non-packaging contributions are very valued and very welcomed.
But it just doesn't sound possible to address them in the same survey,
where the focus is really on welcoming packaging contributions. Even the
initial surveyed group would have to be different, as I plan to survey
people who have recently got their first package accepted in Debian.

Agreed that _this_ survey probably cannot (and probably even should not) address non-packaging contributors and their contributions, not least of which is because of your chosen survey group. (I also note Simon Chopin's comment and my response to it -- the information needed to identify non-packaging contributors to be surveyed may not even be _exist_ at this time.)

Also, this is not the ultimate and final Debian survey on new
contributors. It's an experimental attempt at trying to collect some
useful data, and to do so so we have the data available at DebConf.
There's place for other projects and ways to do that, of course.
For example, the GreenHouse[0] project aims at building infrastructure
to identify, welcome and retain new contributors.

Cool that this is not "the ultimate and final Debian survey on new contributors" -- not that that was likely in the first place, but it's always good to have it explicitly stated. Acknowledged and agreed that this is an experimental attempt, and that there's a short time frame in which to conduct the experiment. (And, this short time frame is also another reason why non-packaging contributors probably cannot be addressed in this survey -- there's not enough _time_ available to do them too.)

I just think it would be good for the survey to explicitly acknowledge that non-packaging contributors and non-packaging contributions exist, and that Debian desires to also improve the way those efforts are made, even though _this_ survey is focused on packaging contributors or contributions.

Remember that, as DPL, not only what you say, but what you _don't_ say, has influence through and beyond the Project.

I wish you much luck and success with this survey, and hope it provides lots of useful information which Debian can use to improve its policies and processes.

Thanks for giving me some of your time by reading this message. I hope it's been of some use and/or interest to you. Be well, do good things.

Joseph