fedora

Fedora Diversity FAD 2017

At Fedora, we are committed to promoting diversity and inclusion in the community. With this in mind, the Fedora Diversity Team together with the Diversity Advisor work on planning and implementation of diversity and inclusion(D&I) efforts such as the enforcement of the code of conduct, highlighting the diverse community in Fedora and offering workshops and fostering communication between Fedora sub-projects. I am lucky to have been a part of this team since some time now. Big thanks to Amita Sharma who invited me to join the Diversity team.

At FLOCK 2016, we had a Fedora Diversity Panel Discussion where we discussed key issues affecting Diversity and Inclusion in Fedora with the Fedora community and heard their concerns. Post FLOCK, we have been working on devising a strategy to address some of the critical issues related to D&I in Fedora. From Jan 27- 29, we conducted our first FAD (like an in-person work meet) in Brno, CZ where Fedora Diversity Team got together in-person to fast-track some of the critical issues relevant to our goals. We also invited Fedora Community Action and Impact Co-ordinator, Brian Exelbird to join us in this FAD.

You can take a look at the logic model detailing our goals for the FAD here. While the agenda was a bit aggressive, having a detailed plan help us delegate our time effectively and look at critical issues.

Fedora Community Survey

The FAD had a massive impact on the progress of the survey. We looked at past community surveys in open source communities, identified and selected questions we wanted to ask, designed the survey and identified the platforms, sketched a timeline for it’s implementation and future tasks.

The biggest decision we probably made was to move away from a survey faced towards just Diversity and Inclusion and focus it more towards Fedora community and it’s composition. Since such a thing has never been done before, we do not have much data about Fedora community and this survey holds the key to achieving that. This also made us move away from any implicit exclusion that might have resulted from our pre-conceived notions of diversity and inclusion.

I feel that Brian did a great job in summarizing the key questions we are looking to answer :

Are there pockets of people we can energize to help us further our progress on objectives and missions in ways we don’t realize?
How do we compare to other communities?
Are there changes we should consider to better serve our community, for example, providing information for localization efforts

Each question and it’s options were scrutinized intensively to assess which new information the question offered to answer and how relevant was it to our current goals, whether it’s language was positive and inclusive of our community and if the options offered were such that they would capture the maximum information possible. We also designed the options to ensure that we were not too penetrative while gathering information but at the same time the survey wouldn’t end up mostly blank. A ‘Prefer Not to Say’ option was hence included instead of making the question optional. Time is of utmost value and hence, we conducted a final voting to ensure that the survey length was ideal for participants. A final list of questions was drafted and is currently awaiting legal review before pushing to production.

Fedora Appreciation Week

Contributors are extremely valuable to open source projects and we at Fedora want to thank the community and appreciate their hard work and valuable contributions without which we wouldn’t be here today. Along these lines, we decided to have a “Fedora Appreciation Week” – a week long celebration of our contributors and their value to the project. We had some great discussions around these and sketched out a rough plan about how it would be implemented using Fedora Badges, Thank You messages and revolving these around the core values of Fedora – Friends. Freedom. Features. First. Stay tuned for more information about this.

Joining Forces with other Open Source communities

Creating diverse and inclusive communities is not a one-man task. It requires the involvement of entire community. We however feel that it shouldn’t be limited to single communities either. Open Source Communities can learn from each other and build from their research so that resources are utilized to their full potential. Our team is currently researching into findings and strategies of other open source communities and if you know any such community which you want us to look into and learn from, don’t hesitate to talk to us via our mailing list diversity@lists.fedoraproject.org

Get involved with Fedora Diveristy

Are you interested in the work we do? Do you want to get involved with Fedora Diversity ? Do you have suggestions for Diversity team about our methods or things we should look into? Do you want to know what Fedora Diversity Team is currently working on ?

Feel free to drop by our biweekly meetings on Freenode #fedora-meeting-1 on Wednesdays at 12:00 UTC.

Thanks

A huge thanks to Fedora Project Leader, Matthew Miller and Fedora Council for making this possible. To Marina Z. and Tatica for joining us remotely and providing their valuable inputs even though the timings were sometimes less than suitable. To Brain for keeping us on track, questioning and re-questioning every small and large decision. To Justin, for the awesome logic model without which gave us a sense of purpose and reminded us of our goals. To Amita, for all the pre-planning before FAD and post FAD – which was definitely a lot- without you we wouldn’t have had a FAD. To Jona, for her inputs and learning on Albanian community and non-technical aspects of Fedora. To Rhea, for the awesome restaurant suggestions along with taking care of all logistics – without you we would have been dead or sick in Brno. To all of you, for making this FAD a huge success.

LinuxCon EU 2016

LinuxCon EU 2016 took place from Oct 4-6 in Berlin, Germany. LinuxCon is one of the biggest FOSS conference where developers, sys admins, architects and all levels of technical talent gather together under one roof for three days. Since I am currently living in Berlin, there was no way I could miss this conference – even though the tickets for attending the full conference were around 1000 euros and way out of my league as a student researcher. Thankfully, I was awarded the Minority scholarship by Linux Foundation to attend the conference (including the talks and workshops) – and also the Women in Open Source Lunch and some other evening events ! I was also a part of the Fedora ‘crew’ at LinuxCon and helping out with Fedora Booth !

Fedora at LinuxCon

Our Fedora booth ‘crew’ consisted mainly of three members – Jiri, Zach and me. Jiri and Zach are Fedora Ambassadors for EMEA region. But we were not the only booth with some Fedora content. Red Hat had a booth on the other side of the room. People could see Fedora and meet Fedora contributors there too. We were also joined by RedHat ‘gang’ involved in Fedora sometimes – mostly Adam (who currently works on Fedora Modularity, but is one of the lead developers and designers of the awesome Fedora Developer Portal) and also Brain Exelbird (Bex) – the Fedora Community Action and Impact Co-ordinator (yes, it’s F-CAIC or F-CAKE depending on how much you like desserts 😛 ) . You can know more about the Fedora impact at LinuxCon + ContainerCon EU 2016 by reading Jiri’s report on LinuxCon EU 2016 on Fedora Community Blog here.

Impact of LinuxCon on Fedora

While we were able to create a special Fedora badge for LinuxCon EU attendees to gauge the impact of the event, out of the 16 times it was awarded , there was only one new contributor ganto and Jiri has talked about the reasons why this happened in his post on Fedora Community Blog.

That being said, there were many people interested in using and/or contributing to Fedora and we were able to point them in the right direction. If you are reading this post and are interested in contributing to Fedora Project but don’t know how to start ? or are confused about which team to join ? – check out Fedora website to help new contributors. If you still have any queries, you can contact one of us (or definitely me).

There were a few common troublepoints for us at the Fedora booth at LinuxCon –

There were quite a few people who felt the Fedora logo looked similar to Facebook.
Some people couldn’t understand that it was Fedora booth as the Fedora logo was at the bottom of the banners. (I think some people were hesitant in approaching the booth because of this too)
People were interested in installing Fedora but couldn’t take the workstation DVDs as their computers had no CD drives. I am not sure how many of those actually went home and downloaded Fedora.
Many were doubtful as why Fedora had a booth separate from RedHat ? (Fedora booth was organized by the community and not Red Hat) and if so, why was it so away ? (Fedora and RedHat booths were at opposite ends of the hall. )

All of us had discussions during LinuxCon about how to improve visibility of Fedora at such events and quite a few interesting points came up including creating swag for interested contributors. Adam even worked on a design for a new Fedora banner with increased visibility. There were also quite a few technical discussions about ongoing developments in Fedora OS, modularity in Fedora and how we were working on it and so on. We also discussed amongst ourselves about different issues affecting Fedora Community including diversity and inclusion in Fedora community.

We ended the conference by going out for dinner at an Indian restaurant with Red Hat ‘gang’ where I ended up having ‘Vindaloo’ for the first time – even though I am an Indian ! 😛

My Takeaways as a Fedora contributor

On a personal note, I feel that conferences are not only a great way to help onboard new users and/or contributors but also a great learning opportunity for existing contributors about different parts of the project, meeting different community members, raising questions about a variety of issues related to the project, learning why some things are taking place in a certain way and sometimes even having a suggestion or idea which could potentially impact the system for better. In case of projects like Fedora where most of the contributions are virtual, it definitely ‘humanizes’ the project i.e. for me, I have began to understand that barriers for entry in FOSS are not unnecessarily high and I don’t have to be an expert in the area I contribute or I don’t need to have loads of free time – all I need is an avid interest and the rest will be taken care of !

LinuxCon EU talks and events

I didn’t know anything about containers before attending LinuxCon + ContainerCon but after attending some elementary talks on containers, I can definitely say I know the basics and can deploy a kubernetes module 😛

Apart from container-related talks, some other talks I found pretty interesting were

‘Gender-diversity analysis of technical contributions’ by dizquierdo from Bitergia. The talk combined my two interests – metrics and diversity and really helps make sense of the diversity issue in FOSS by supporting it with numbers. I wanted to meet Daniel after the talk to discuss about the diversity metrics, the work Bitergia is doing and it’s similarity with my work involving community metrics in Fedora (on contributor engagement, impact of attending events on contributors and community, improving contributor retention rates and diversity related metrics) but somehow between being at Fedora booth and attending talks, I could never find him. So @dizquierdo, if you read this – however unlikely that is, I am a fan of Bitergia and would love to discuss more about metrics Bitergia compiles and analyses 🙂 (Slides for the talk are here )

The talk on ‘FOSS Involvement of Google’ was also very interesting. I always knew Google had some Open Source projects and even used them but never knew that Google actually contributed to LinuxKernel. (Slides for the talk are here)

Other talks which I found interesting were ‘Outreachy Linux Kernel Internship Report’ by Julia Lawall and other past Outreachy interns, ‘Corporate Trends in Open Source Engagement’ by Nithya Ruff, ‘IF YOU BUILD IT,THEY WON’T COME’ about non-technical aspects of FOSS projects by Ruth Suehle, ‘Graphite@Scale:How to store million metrics per second’ by Vladimir Smirnov of Booking.com . I couldn’t attend all of these talks but the slides were informative and I hope the videos are uploaded soon.

You can find the slides for all talks here.

Networking is tough ! Or maybe, it’s all about curiousity

As with all conferences, LinuxCon is a great opportunity for networking. However, I am a dummy at ‘networking’ since I recently graduated from my college in India where networking was not in anybody’s vocabulary. While I did visit booths, collected swag, talked about job opportunities – I wasn’t able to forge any contacts. We had a networking event in evening at Charlottenberg Palace and I remember everybody talking and laughing with glasses of wine and me wondering about the right question to start a conversation. While I did manage to talk with different people by the end of the evening, I realised I forged contacts when I was actually interested and curious about the product and wasn’t just asking someone for jobs. I was able to talk to people working in different FOSS organizations, know about their experiences and the products they were working on, how they used data analytics and Machine Learning – and sometimes walk away with job opportunities – all because I was curious and interested in their organization, and not just looking for a job ! It was tougher to initiate personal contact at booths though since booths had multiple people at times and personal contacts were hard to make. However, I was able to learn a lot about the ongoing projects at organizations, the opportunities and work environment at the booths. I was especially fascinated by a Unity game made by a Business Administration intern at HP during his summer internship – it just shows the diversity of opportunities you have at such workplaces. I also took part in some raffle contents, but never won anything! (Zach won a game though – like Legos, but not as interesting – is all I could understand about it 😛 )

Research Opportunities and Scholarships

Since I am interested in pursuing a PhD, I was interested in exploring research collaborations with FOSS projects and organizations – via a research project with mentor in the organization, collecting data from the organization, scholarships or support for FOSS related research work or joint PhD programs with research institution and the FOSS organization but couldn’t find much opportunities in this area. Afaik, Red Hat Brno sometimes has students working for thesis with them but it is generally OS-development related and not for data analytics. Ping me, if you know something !

Marketing

Sponsors for conferences at LinuxCon spend a lot of money for the booths, the swag and goodies at the booth (giving away T-Shirts at booths was common and some even had USBs and power banks), and many more including the expenses of the employees who represent the organization at the event. The expenses are huge, but do organizations get returns for what they spent ? The rational answer is that they do, otherwise why else would they come back ? But isn’t there a better of evaluating the impact at these events ? Bex and I had a long discussion about the different costs a organization like Red Hat incurs for being a part of LinuxCon but I would love to know more about how they measure the impact they have at a particular event.

Women in Open Source

Diversity and Inclusion in FOSS is one of the topics very close to my heart and I was extremely excited to be given an opportunity to be a part of the Women in Open Source Lunch at LinuxCon. Since I am also a part of Diversity Team at Fedora and involved with FOSSWave (an outreach initiative for new FOSS contributors in India), I felt this would be a great learning opportunity where I could apply the learnings directly towards the benefit of the FOSS community.

Lunch and Discussion, Meeting Role models

Over lunch, girls and women from different phases of their career and involved with different FOSS projects discussed about different issues related to diversity and inclusion in FOSS communities. The 50 or so group of women were divided around 8-10 tables with each table discussing a particular issue(question). At the end of the lunch, a moderator from each table spoke in brief about the ideas or solutions they had come up regarding the issue.The questions we discussed ranged from ‘What diversity or inclusivity programs do you see working and how can FOSS communities adopt those ? Programs from software, propreitery companies, FOSS companies etc‘(which was my table), ‘How can women support other women in community?‘ to ‘What does safety mean in online communities? What can we do to ensure communities are safe ?‘

I found the format especially helpful and efficient when conducting such a diversity related panel/QA session at conferences. I have compiled a list of the topics we discussed and the solutions other women came up with here which you can edit with your own comments on the issue.

My key takeaways from the discussion were :

Start young – start breaking down the stereotypes in high school. The root of the problem starts in high schools and it is easier to tackle at the earliest stage. Also, when doing this , involve not just students but also parents and teachers as they make up the environment and community which shapes the individuals perceptions !
Start small ! Speak up! – If you see something wrong – don’t ignore or let it slide even if it is not technically harmful. Small disruptions lead to big changes. Share your success stories, mentor someone from your community – every small bit counts.
Provide role models and mentors – Many succesful programs involve mentorship. Helps ease the transition and feels good to have a support system and know people who have done it, you don’t feel alone.
We need a dedicated and active support channel for diversity and inclusion related issues across projects and communities.

During the lunch, I was also able to meet a lot of my role models from FOSS communites and learnt about the experiences of some awesome women in Open Source like Nithya Ruff of Western Digital, Julia Lawall of Linux Kernal and many past Outreachy interns as well as FOSS contributors.

Along with the awesome lunch, goodies by Sandisk (I desperately needed a pen drive, thank you!) and beautiful birds-eye view of Berlin from 13th floor of the hotel, the event also had some fun activities like raffle in the end – and surprisingly, I got lucky and won a Berlin Bear ! Yaay !

Diversity Survey, Talking to different organizations and people

There are multiple ongoing efforts across different FOSS projects and organizations to improve diversity and promote workplace inclusion for minority groups in their respective communities. However, these efforts are not consolidated and do not look towards analyzing the impact of those strategies – about what is working and what isn’t ! With this in mind, I have started a Diversity and Inclusion study (more details here) to get an overview of diversity and inclusion practices across different FOSS projects, communities or organizations and learn from their success and failures too and share it with other FOSS organizations and projects so that the same mistakes don’t get repeated again and again ! The study is still in it’s nascent stage and I am working on the shortcomings to better develop the study however, I talked to different people and organizations(representatives at Booths) to learn about their experiences and/or how their organization is working towards this. I learnt quite a few interesting things and if you would love to be a part of this study, please ping me so we can discuss more.

To sum it up, LinuxCon was an awesome learning experience, full of fun – I wish I could have attended more talks and talked to more people(especially those from Bitergia and Fitbit) – but I gained knowledge about a lot of new stuff like Containers, learnt about new FOSS projects and organizations, helped onboard some new contributors to Fedora and brainstormed about some community issues, gained a fresh perspective on diversity and inclusion in FOSS – all while collecting some awesome swag and a Berlin bear along the way !

Software Freedom Kosova 2016

Software Freedom Kosova (SFK) 2016 took place in Prishtina from October 21-23, 2016. We were able to push a special Fedora badge for SFK to be awarded to SFK attendees who vist the Fedora booth. The badge was awarded 14 times out of which 12 were existing contributors while 2 new contributors were onboarded at the event ! Yaay – we look forward to seeing you in the community nafieshehu and marianab.

I was supposed to be speaking on ‘What is Machine Learning and how FOSS Organizations use it?’ at SFK. However, there were problems with my visa and Easyjet crew wouldn’t let me board my flight to Prishtina. The SFK organizers (most of them contributors from FLOSSK) were really understanding and helpful. I was able to finally conduct my talk remotely. I am especially thankful to Jona Azizaj and Ardian Haxha .

The talk was about –

What is Machine Learning ? and it’s applications.
Basic Machine Learning Algorithms with examples
Case Studies of FOSS organizations : How do FOSS organizations like Fedora, Wikimedia, Mozilla use Machine Learning ?
Interested in Machine Learning ? Resources

You can find the preliminary version of slides for the talk here

The talk aimed at introducing Machine Learning to the audience and I would love to interact with anyone interested in knowing more about learning Machine Learning or contributing to FOSS organizations in this area.

Jona and I were also going to conduct a workshop on Introduction to Non Technical Contributions in Free and Open Source Software. It is a common misconception that you need to know programming to contribute to FLOSS organizations and that contributors only work on technical tasks. This workshop aimed to bust this myths by introducing participants to non coding tasks in FLOSS organizations and mainly Fedora. We (Jona and I) were going to talk about diverse non technical contribution opportunities in FOSS by taking example of Fedora like Marketing, Translation, Design, Writing articles for Fedora Magazine or contributing to Community Operations. Jona went on to conduct the workshop with other Fedora contributors at SFK like Giannis K. , Anxhela H, Elio Qoshi and others.

The slides for the workshop are here. You can view it better after you download it.

Even though I couldn’t attend SFK, I could feel it to be a huge success all the way to Berlin !

I hope to learn from the presentations of the talks I wanted to but couldn’t attend – especially ‘Hacking the tenders data: the quest for public spending patterns’ by Victor Netu and ‘Using Open Source Technology for Social Change’ by Blinera Merta. I also planned to visit FLOSSK , Prishtina Hackerspace and Girls Coding Kosova – which are some awesome FOSS communities in Prishtina and learn about their ongoing projects, their journey (Prishtina Hackerspace was founded by crowdsourcing the funds!) and hoped to apply those learnings in India – but better luck next time (maybe during next SFK).

Shihemi se shpejti, Prishtina !

My FOSS Journey and Why I am applying for a Toptal Scholarship

When I graduated from my high school in India, our class had an almost 50-50 ratio of boys-to-girls. My graduating class in one of India’s premier engineering institutions had less than 10%. It was even more interesting to see that there were more than 20% girls enrolled in Bachelors in Design (which offered courses like Product Design, Human Computer Interaction and User Experience Research) while there were none in Mechanical Engineering since the last three graduating classes. Was it that Design was considered a relatively non-technical course ? While I have never been openly discouraged from pursuing a career in technology – a predominantly male-populated field – there has always been an unconscious bias even from within my family. When I wanted to apply for a degree course in Mechanical Engineering, I was asked to take some more time to think about my future – was gently nudged towards more female-friendly engineering fields like Computer Science which wouldn’t involve as much strenuous physical effort. Was it even sublte experiences like this which had contributed towards the gender gap ? This feeling of being an ‘outsider’ in a predominantly male field never left till I started contributing to Open Source.

I first learnt about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) via Outreachy, a program designed to increase participation of minorities in FOSS. I liked the fact that the program had no knowledge prerequisites so that anyone interested in contributing to FOSS could be a part of it. I started contributing to the Fedora Community Operations team and even though I wasn’t selected to be a part of Outreachy for Fedora due to some technical reasons, I had finally felt ‘included’ in a FOSS community and decided to stick around. My contributions to FOSS have mainly been in three areas :

1. Community Research involving Data Analytics

My contributions to Fedora Community Operations have been on developing metrics to understand and help the community. I have worked on developing metrics to understand contributor engagement in the community, analyze the impact of attending events on the activity of an individual contributor as well as in organization as a whole (resource utilization, number of newcomers onboarded etc). This has helped Fedora leadership in decision-making process. Recently, I have been working on metrics to improve contributor retention rates in the Fedora community. Newcomer onboarding in FOSS projects in important, but retaining them is critical. According to statistics I collected about Fedora Project community, more than half of the contributors (who made atleast one technical or non technical contribution to the project) drop out within their first three months. If these people are interested in contributing, why do they leave ? My research tries to identify the root causes behind these ‘drop-out’ cases. It also suggests easily adoptable methods for the organization, community and individual contributors so that more newcomers are retained and even existing contributors find it easy to contribute to the project.

You can find my talk about it at the annual Fedora contributors conference Flock here. Link to the github repository for the project is here and link to blog posts about the work here.

2. Efforts to promote Diversity in Open Source

I am also involved with the Fedora Diversity Team where I collect statistics to understand diversity in Fedora community. I work closely with the Fedora Diversity Adviser and Diversity Team on identifying target areas and devising strategies to positively impact these identified areas. Apart from this, I recently started conducting a Diversity and Workplace Inclusion Survey about FOSS projects, organizations and communities. There are multiple ongoing efforts across different FOSS projects and organizations to improve diversity and promote workplace inclusion for minority groups in their respective communities. However, these efforts are not consolidated and do not look towards analyzing the impact of those strategies – about what is working and what isn’t ! With this study, I wanted to get an overview of diversity and inclusion practices across different FOSS projects, communities or organizations and learn from their success and failures too and share it with other FOSS organizations and projects so that the same mistakes don’t get repeated again and again !

You can find the link to the Github project for Diversity study here. More interviews will be uploaded if interviewees dont mind making the interviews public.

3. Outreach Efforts

I am involved with FOSSWave, a mentorship program to help university students in India to contribute to FOSS projects. Contributing to FOSS organizations and projects seems pretty daunting to newcomers. FOSSWave helps to ease this process by providing mentors to interested students by conducting workshops and talks in universities across India. By being a part of FOSSWave, I hope to engage with the open source community as a female role model and plan to mentor more students and women into contributing to FOSS. In this direction, FOSSWave has recently started a program named Women in Technology to mentor more female students interested in FOSS. You can read more about programs by FOSSWave here and here.

Learnings from my experience in FOSS

It has been about one year since my first contribution to FOSS now. Within such a short span, I have not only immensely improved my programming and data science skills but have also learnt a lot about commitment, team work, mentorship and leadership, how to create a positive community and the joy of sharing and giving that is Open Source. Most importantly, I have gained confidence in myself and my skills. All this has further motivated me to continue contributing to FOSS, while also working on outreach and diversity efforts, so that more people – especially women – are able to be a part of this great experience.

What will I gain from a Toptal Scholarship ?

As a result, I have been desperately searching for a mentorship program which would not want me to compromise my dreams of pursuing research and doing a PhD (mostly related to understanding humans) one day while contributing to FOSS. That’s how less than eight hours before the application deadline, I stumbled across Toptal STEM Scholarship for Women. As a result, while all of the contributions I have mentioned are during the application period, none of my FOSS contributions were done keeping in mind the Toptal scholarship program but instead are about the projects or issues I deeply care about. However, the mentorship from the experienced Toptal engineers would be helpful in providing unique and helpful insights on further develop this research on FOSS communities, to maximize it’s potential impact and help apply it in industry by developing tools for FOSS organizations to understand and improve their communities as well as allocate their resources in a more efficient manner. I also plan to utilize extensive Open Source developer network of Toptal to understand diversity and workplace inclusion initiatives – including successes and pitfalls across a wide variety of tech organizations. This scholarship will also help develop the FOSSWave program by providing a wide an extensive network of role models in the industry, especially for interested female contributors. The mentorship from the Toptal community would be helpful to providing unique and helpful insights on how to further develop FOSSWave program too.

FLOCK Diaries – Krakow, 2016

tldr ; FLOCK 2016 took place in Krakow, Poland and I was lucky to be a part of it. During the conference, I met many awesome and inspiring folks from the Fedora community including those I have interacted with on IRC, gave my first talk, organized the CommOps workshop and attended many other wonderful talks and workshops which motivated me to further contribute to Fedora – all while enjoying the nightlife of Krakow ! I also made some pretty awesome friends from all around the globe whom I hope to meet again soon..

FLOCK is the annual Fedora contributor conference which happens every year around August alternatively in Europe and North America. This year it was in Krakow, Poland – a beautiful city situated on the Vistula river full of history, culture and Fedora contributors 😛

I had submitted two different talk ideas for FLOCK in April and one of them ‘I contributed ! But what now ? ‘ which was about increasing contributor retention rates in Fedora community using data analytics got accepted ! Yaay !

I was a bit relaxed after that and didn’t worry much when there was no further contact by FLOCK organizers for hotel and travel bookings. But by early July, I was panicking a lot ! Turns out, I had registered for FLOCK using a different email id (non f.p.o one) and submitted the talk using my f.p.o email id and hence was dropped from the list of sponsored attendees. Anyway, thanks to FLOCK organizers and especially, Joe Brockmier it all worked out in the end since I was already in Berlin for my research work and didn’t need a new visa ! So come August 2, I was all set and ready to fly to FLOCK..

I expected a huge crowd at the airport as the Youth Day had just ended and Pope had left the earlier day, but it wasn’t too busy. However, people arriving after us weren’t so lucky. At the airport, I met other Fedora contributors Amita Sharma, Justin Flory, Stephen Gallagher and Ryan Lerch – all tired and groggy from their long haul flights! Rafal Luzynski dropped us to our hotel and also stopped us from making bad decisions like exchanging euros to zolates at the airport konto with bad exchange rates – and a lot more in the near future. A big shout out to Rafal for being an awesome organizer ! That day, we just visited a nearby mall for lunch, relaxed a bit in our rooms and went out to the Town Square at night to try traditional Polish cuisine. There was an issue with my hotel rooms because of the different email id fiasco but it got resolved pretty soon. A shout out to Brian Exelbird(bex) and Joe Brockmeir(jzb) for their organizing a wonderful FLOCK again 🙂 We also had a bit of a scare at night right after we were back in the hotel. We were back in the hotel courtyard-cum-parking lot and we had just met Redon Skikuli, Jona Azizaj and Giannis Konstantinidis – Fedora Ambassadors from Albania and Greece*. Some of us were on the footpath while some of us were on the road (mind you, it was all inside the hotel courtyard) happily talking and getting to know others when a huge bus came suddenly charging at us from nowhere. Had I jumped one second later, I would have been dead ! And yes, the bus driver didn’t even honk – just flashed the lights – as if we were supposed to have eyes at the back of our head ! Anyway, it was an exciting start to the conference ..

August 3rd was the first day of FLOCK. I had my talk scheduled at 11 : 00 am and I was surprised and very happy to see Fedora Project Leader, Matthew Miller(mattdm) amongst the attendees. The talk went quite well and a lot of people were surprised to see from data that after 3 months, about 50% of the contributors drop off the grid completely. I presented some ways and metrics on how we could improve this scenario including having a definite onboarding process, positive community and feedback mechanisms. I had done a quick survey of the Fedora contributors about what made them stay and it was interesting to see it’s not just about loving your work – a strong FOSS community is what makes people stay. People also cited the four Fedora foundations , a sense of giving back to the community and constant learning as reasons which made them stay ! I also talked about the positive impact of attending Fedora events and the patterns of long term contributors – how they value consistency over quantity while contributing. Later, we also discussed about the ways we could reduce these numbers of contributors dropping out – and one interesting idea which came up was about sending a feedback/reminder email to contributors after a certain period of inactivity ! I would love to see if implementing that changes these numbers in any way. The talk wouldn’t have been possible if Sachin Kamath wouldn’t have helped me – he is a CommOps team member and a current GSoC student working on metrics and Onboarding – a big shout out to him for all his help ! After the talk (after I had fangirled over mattdm and taken photos with him ), mattdm and I discussed a bit about the tool Sachin was building as a part of GSoC on getting intern statistics and group wise metrics for Fedora and how it could be used to automated the metrics from ‘State of Fedora’ talks.

Later that day, I attended some interesting sessions including ‘Zanata Translation Platform’ by Alex Eng, ‘Fedora Swag’ by Jiri Eischmann, ‘Mailman 3 and HyperKitty’ by Aurelian Bompard and ‘University Outreach’ by Jona Azizaj and Justin Flory. Zanata is a web-based translation platform for translators, content creators and developers to manage localization projects. It also offers translation statistics and API to query data which made me interested in generating metrics for the translator community in Fedora. I was particularly interested in finding if translators were same as other Fedora contributors in their burnout rates especially considering they had different sort of community environment – smaller, non-IRC, different privileges in Fedora community. The ‘Fedora Swag’ talk was particularly interesting as Jiri discussed on how and why Fedora produced a particular kind of swag, different kinds of swags and their target audience and motivations , how recently marketing had decided to focus on python community in Fedora and hence swag production had become more targetted towards ‘Fedora ❤ Python’ initiatives. We also had an interesting discussion about how swag in terms of flyers promote more interest and involvement than just stickers. However, I would have loved to see some sort of feedback or data backing these motivations but all in all, it was a pretty interesting peek behind the decision making in the Fedora Marketing team. I also learnt during the session that Fedora tshirts were given out at FOSDEM 2016 to anyone with a FAS account getting the FOSDEM badge and while there were some issues while signing up for FAS for people, all in all quite a few people got those Fedora Tshirts. Jiri said there were about a 100 Fedora Tshirts. About 19 newcomers were onboarded during FOSDEM, it would be interesting to see if they just created a FAS account for T Shirt or they actually contributed ! The ‘University Outreach’ talk was the last talk for the day but it was certainly very packed – I almost didnt get a plce to sit! It was presented by Jona Azizaj and Justin Flory. Both Jona and Justin are students and Fedora Ambassadors from Albania and North America respectively. The talk was originally to be given by Ardian Haxha – a Fedora Ambassador from Kosovo and Justin but he couldn’t make it due to last minute visa problems unfortunately. The talk focused on the University Involvement Initiative proposed by Fedora Council in early 2015. It was a pretty interesting talk about marketing thoughts around attracting university students to Fedora and lead to some pretty interesting discussions amongst the attendees.

During the evening, the organizers had planned a walking tour of Krakow and it was really fun. Our guide – the one with an yellow umbrella – was pretty funny and made history seem really exciting. The city – the historical structures, stone buildings, crowds thronging the restaurants, women drawn horse carriages – everything seemed so beautiful that I felt transported to another century – or 1800s to be precise. Once, I got so engrossed taking pictures that we got lost and followed another group ! We saw castles, churches, modern art, dragon statue and the walked along the beautiful river Vistula. Finding a restaurant afterwards for dinner was pretty tough as flock attendees had filled every place, we made a bad choice for restaurant and even missed the last bus back but the night ended well with a game of spin the bottle in the hotel and some pretty interesting dares and friends made for a lifetime.

The next day, August 4th, we had diversity panel discussion and the morning was spent working on it ! I got to meet some awesome ladies in Open Source who were a part of the panel like Marina Z. who works on Outreach Efforts in Red Hat and also coordinates the GNOME Outreachy program, Marie Nordin(reicatnor) who has designed some pretty awesome Fedora Badges and was a past Outreachy Intern for Fedora and of course our very own Amita Sharma from Red Hat Pune , who organized the Fedora Womend Day in India and Maria ‘tatica’ Leonardo – the Fedora Diversity Advisor. While tatica couldn’t be there in person, we however could manage to have a live video session with her. The Panel Discussion revolved tackling bullying in the open source community and devising plans to increase diversity in open source. While we felt the crunch of time as it was just for an hour, the discussion really did give some great insights on how to tackle the issues. I also attended other talks on ‘Bugyou’ by Sayan Chowdhury , ‘Women in Open Source’ by Amita Sharma and partly ‘How we took care of spam’ by Patrick Uiterwijk.

Bugyou is a service which listens to fedmsg messages and interacts with the issue tracking tools through an API. It has a collection of plugins where each of the plugin is configured to listens to one or more fedmsg topics and automatically files bugs to the configured issue tracking tools. Sayan talked about it’s structure and plugin configurations. It was interesting to note that we had to manually configure the bug topics in .cfg file along with the issue tracking tool and I was left wondering of how I could use the tool for tracking some metrics or topics and not just bugs. Amita and Patrick’s talks were at the same time so I had to jump between them. Amita talked about increasing women participation in Open Source. This is especially important considering the skewed numbers – in about 250 FLOCK attendees, only 15 were women !! She shared information about great groups and opportunities, such as OpenHatch, Women in Drupal, PyLadies, Outreachy and Google Summer of Code – and some of them were even new to me ! I am so signing up for a PyLadies meetup in Berlin – Thanks Amita ! She also talked about the idea for a helping-pyramid in Fedora community where each Fedora woman can be a mentor of two more women and so on helping in making the numbers grow which I really like. Patrick Uiterwijk(puiterwijk) talked about the recent spam FAS accounts in Fedora community and how he wrote Basset to tackle it. I was especially interested in learning about the Machine Learning and scoring techniques behind Basset and all I can say here is that, patrick has done some pretty great work on it ! puiterwijk++ That evening we enjoyed a river cruise. They view from the cruise was pretty scenic with trains, bridges, castle and the river and I also saw a bridge with locks of love like in Paris on it. However, the night didn’t end there – some of us were crazy enough to go clubbing afterwards but it was a lot of fun even though we took quite a while to find the club !

The next day was CommOps workshop and Justin and I worked on it early in the morning. Later, they were some Lightning talks – which I wanted to attend but couldn’t and some workshops. The CommOps workshop went pretty well. We had discussions about Python SIG onboarding , how to improve the Fedora election process and the voter turnout and some discussions regarding what type of metrics we should work on in near future. There was also a G11N meetup later where Pravin Satpute led the discussion about the globalization team, the issues they were facing and the things they were looking forward to in the future. There was also some discussion about Zanata metrics which interested me to contribute to and I hope to introduce myself on the localization mailing list once we are back home. In the evening, we all went to celebrate at Brewery Lubicz.

The next day was the last day of FLOCK and there was surely a feeling of bittersweet goodbyes in the air. There was a Hubs workshop which I was interested in and Wallpaper Hunt but we all ended up walking on the streets of Krakow in the evening instead. We sat down at an expensive restaurant, got out and ate cheap kebabs and doner instead, saw an improptu parade – I met a Gryfinndor and a butterfly lady too – and just soaked around in the beauty that is Krakow. Obviously, the night ended in a party – like always – and Jona and I even managed to convince Adam Miller(maxamillion) and Justin to stay and party with us even when they had a early morning flight. The next day all of us left for our own destinations, but that night – we were each happy in the moment – FLOCK had ended but our Fedora journey had just began 🙂

Before attending FLOCK, I was a bit hesitant about continuing to contribute to Fedora and mainly whether I could manage it with my research. However at FLOCK, I met and interacted with people who were contributing much more than me while managing other aspects of their life – and they were doing it pretty well too ! I also met contributors whom I have interacted and collaborated with in IRC like pingou , threebean , jflory7 and mattdm and felt the impact of my work – when people met me and they knew me beforehand because of my metrics related work, or when they used my work in their talk, or when Jan Kurik came up to me and thanked me for helping him out in the elections – I knew I was working in the right direction. It is all these moments – of knowing that my work is impacting someone somewhere – that I contribute for and will continue to do so. Till now, I have only worked on metrics which show how attending fedora events increases the contribution activity of participants and how it makes them contribute longer – but today, after attending flock – I also know the why behind it 🙂

Bee.

Fedora at FOSDEM

* Introduction blatantly copied from mattdm’s Five Things in Fedora This week post in Magazine .

” Fedora spends quite a bit of energy, time, money, and other resources on Fedora’s presence at conferences. But, it’s unclear how much this actually matters — does it bring in new Fedora users? What about contributors? Well, over on the CommOps team, contributor Bee Padalkar set out to figure out. As I discussed in my State of Fedora talk at Devconf.cz, a lot of the activity in Fedora infrastructure generates messages on fedmsg — it’s like Twitter for all of our systems talking to each other, rather than for humans.

Bee starts by looking at attendees who got the FOSDEM 2016 Badge at the Fedora booth there, and then observing their activity after the conference. Accounts which start at the conference and then become ongoing, active contributors = measurable conference success. Read about this on the CommOps list, and stay tuned for more analysis of other conferences, and of course my favorite — pretty graphs.* ” — mattdm

This article tries to measure the impact of FOSDEM – especially in terms of newcomer onboarding and contributor retention in Fedora. I start by looking at the attendees who claimed the FOSDEM Badge[1][2] [3] at the Fedora Booth.

FOSDEM Participation

Number of Fedora Contributors who attended FOSDEM 2016 : 76 out of which 19 were newcomers onboarded during the event.

Number of Fedora Contributors who attended FOSDEM 2015 : 52 – unfortunately, no newcomers were onboarded during FOSDEM 2015.

Number of Fedora Contributors who attended FOSDEM 2014 : 52 out of which 9 were newcomers onboarded during the event.

The number of past FOSDEM attendees coming back to attend FOSDEM is also interesting.

In FOSDEM 2015, 19 attendees out of 52 had previously attended FOSDEM (from FOSDEM 2014). In 2016, 21 contributors from FOSDEM 2015 attended FOSDEM 2016. Overall in 2016, 28 contributors out of 76 had attended FOSDEM in the past. There are 10 Fedora contributors who are regular FOSDEM attendees – 2014,2015,2016 . We can obviously see that the popularity of FOSDEM has increased amongst Fedora contributors – especially those who have attended the event in past. Also, number of newcomers onboarded in FOSDEM 2016 was significantly greater than previous years – about one third of existing contributors who attended FOSDEM 2016 !

Contribution Activity

Contribution Activity during FOSDEM

FOSDEM 2014

Highest fedmsg Activity by Fedora contributor during event : 698 messages (gnokii)

Lowest fedmsg Activity by Fedora contributor during event : 0 messages (2 contributors)

Mean fedmsg Activity by Fedora contributor during event : 25 messages

Median fedmsg Activity by Fedora contributor during event : 5 messages

Mean fedmsg Activity by newcomer during event : 7 messages

Median fedmsg Activity by newcomer during event : 8 messages

FOSDEM 2015

Highest fedmsg Activity by Fedora contributor during event : 6219 messages (pbrobinson)

Lowest fedmsg Activity by Fedora contributor during event : 0 messages (17 contributors)

Mean fedmsg Activity by Fedora contributor during event : 125 messages

Median fedmsg Activity by Fedora contributor during event : 2 messages

(No newcomers were onboarded during FOSDEM 2015)

FOSDEM 2016

Highest fedmsg Activity by Fedora contributor during event : 6968 messages (pbrobinson )

Lowest fedmsg Activity by Fedora contributor during event : 0 messages (5 contributors)

Mean fedmsg Activity by Fedora contributor during event : 99 messages

Median fedmsg Activity by Fedora contributor during event : 5 messages

Mean fedmsg Activity by newcomer during event : 13 messages

Median fedmsg Activity by newcomer during event : 12 messages

The median is a more representative measure for measuring overall activity of existing Fedora contributors during FOSDEM as it is not affected by extreme values in data. The high number of fedmsgs generated by pbrobinson during FOSDEM 2015 and 2016 had led to an increase in the overall mean , while the median remains almost the same. Overall, FOSDEM 2014 and 2016 show higher activity than FOSDEM 2015.

It is interesting to note that

Every Fedora newcomer has had some contribution activity during FOSDEM apart from just claiming the FOSDEM badge (unlike existing contributors).
The median fedmsg activity of newcomers during FOSDEM has been higher than that of of existing Fedora contributors during FOSDEM .
Existing Fedora contributors have a vast difference between their mean and median activities during FOSDEM suggesting highly unequal distribution of contribution activity during the event. This is unlike the case of newcomers who have very similar mean and median values i.e. overall similar contribution activity during their initial onboarding.

As we can see till now , FOSDEM 2016 has been a success for Fedora in terms of participation , newcomer onboarding as well as contributions during the event.

Post FOSDEM Contribution Activity

I measured the contribution activity of FOSDEM attendees over short term i.e. one month as well as long term i.e. one year pre and post the event to understand how the conference has impacted their work .

Apart from generating visualizations for comparing the pre event and post event activity(both short term and long term), I also tried to classify contributors according to their pre and post event activity to quantify any increase/decrease in their contribution pattern. For this , contributors was divided into different categories based on their fedmsg activity i.e. 1. low activity contributors (<10 contributions in a month or < 100 in a year) , 2. moderately active contributors(10 -100 contributions in a month or 100 – 1000 in a year) , highly active contributors(100 – 500 contributions in a month or 1000 – 5000 in a year ) , super *awesome* ninja contributors (> 500 contributions in a month or >5000 contributions in a year). I looked for ‘jumps’ by contributors from one activity group to another.

Other than that, I also tried to find correlations in contribution activity to answer the following questions :

Consistency of Contributions : How correlated is the short term activity and long term activity of a contributor ?
Correlation of contribution Activity during the event to future behavior
Impact of Event on Activity : Correlation between pre and post event activity

To understand this, I used Pearson correlation coefficient and p-value as a measure.

The Pearson correlation coefficient measures the linear relationship between two datasets. Like other correlation coefficients, this one varies between -1 and +1 with 0 implying no correlation. Correlations of -1 or +1 imply an exact linear relationship. Positive correlations imply that as x increases, so does y. Negative correlations imply that as x increases, y decreases.

The p-value roughly indicates the probability of an uncorrelated system producing datasets that have a Pearson correlation at least as extreme as the one computed from these datasets.

FOSDEM 2014

Short Term Contribution Activity of FOSDEM 2014 attendees

Find the datagrepper charts link here . The timeline is from one month before the event till one month after the event. Notably, the middle of the timeline shows a peak denoting FOSDEM.

Long Term Contribution Activity of FOSDEM 2014 attendees

The timeline is from one year before the event till one year after the event. Hence, the middle of the timeline or 12 months from the start denotes FOSDEM 2014 .

While the activity just after FOSDEM seems to have decreased, a huge amount of activity seems to have been generated starting from five months after the event. However, it needs to be investigated further if this is due to impact of FOSDEM or due to any infrastructure or other changes perhaps.

Activity of Newcomers Onboarded from FOSDEM 2014

9 Newcomers were onboarded during FOSDEM 2014.

Find the datagrepper charts link here. The timeline is from the ending of FOSDEM till one year afterwards. It is important to note that out of 9 newcomers onboarded during FOSDEM 2014 only one continued contributing post the event. This graph hence denotes activity of only one newcomer. It is also important to note the scale of fedmsg activity here – the messages are too less(<15) over the year though there has been an immediate surge in activity post FOSDEM.

Patterns in User activity for FOSDEM 2014

Consistency of Contributions : How correlated is the short term activity and long term activity of a contributor ?

Correlation between short term activity and long term activity (pre FOSDEM activity) : 0.29194433524400315 P value : 0.035724116013432963

Correlation between short term activity and long term activity (post FOSDEM activity) : 0.21466778695361466 P value : 0.12645318597081681

Correlation of contribution Activity during the event to future behavior

Correlation between event activity and Short Term Activity Post event : 0.21503645664240145 P value : 0.12578747089809081
Correlation between event activity and Long Term Activity Post event : -0.03127131151557708 P value : 0.82581453809443239

Impact of Event on Activity : Correlation between pre and post event activity

Correlation between pre and post event Short Term Activity : 0.84370827747699251 P value : 4.0876708021516965e-15
Correlation between pre and post event Long Term Activity : 0.054556575463531362 P value : 0.70087773348995186

The correlation coefficient values for activity of FOSDEM 2014 contributors are too low and hence, inconclusive except for the correlation between pre and post event Short Term Activity. Short term activity before and after FOSDEM for contributors is highly correlated and also has a very small p-value. I do not derive conclusions from these values as they may have been affected due to huge amount of activity generated five months from FOSDEM 2014 which can be due to infra changes.

Activity wise Contributor Classification of FOSDEM 2014 attendees

Short Term Activity

Out of 52 contributors who attended FOSDEM 2014, 10 contributors had an increase in their activity immediately after FOSDEM and jumped ‘up’ i.e. from lower activity groups before FOSDEM to higher activity groups after FOSDEM while 7 contributors had a decrease in activity immediately after FOSDEM and jumped ‘down’ i.e. classified into a lower activity region.

Long Term Activity

Out of 52 contributors who attended FOSDEM 2014, 18 contributors had an increase in their long term activity after FOSDEM and jumped ‘up’ i.e. from lower activity groups before FOSDEM to higher activity groups after FOSDEM while 3 contributors had a decrease in their long term activity after FOSDEM and jumped ‘down’ i.e. classified into a lower activity region.

Overall, in both short term and long term , number of contributors who had an increase in their level of contribution activity were higher than those who had a decrease.

It is also interesting to note that :

Only one out of nine newcomers on boarded continued contributing after the event and had low activity (<15 messages in year)
Out of existing contributors who attended FOSDEM many seemed to have had an ‘significant’ increase in their long term contribution activity and have even jumped from lower activity levels to extremely high contribution level (>5000 messages in one year )
In long term post FOSDEM , number of contributors in extremely high activity level (>5000 messages in one year ) is same as those in any other level and contributors are equally distributed within levels while prior to FOSDEM, it was skewed it majority of contributors in medium activity range and very less contributors in high activity range.

FOSDEM 2015

Short Term Contribution Activity of FOSDEM 2015 attendees

Find the datagrepper charts link here . The timeline is from one month before the event till one month after the event. The middle of the timeline denotes FOSDEM. While there is a decrease in activity of FOSDEM 2015 attendees during FOSDEM itself, their contribution activity has increased a lot immediately after FOSDEM as compared to just before the event.

Long Term Contribution Activity of FOSDEM 2015 attendees

The timeline is from one year before the event till one year after the event. Hence, the middle of the timeline or 12 months from the start denotes FOSDEM 2015 .

There has been a slow increase in overall activity of FOSDEM 2015 attendees over long term.

Activity of Newcomers Onboarded from FOSDEM 2015

No Newcomers were onboarded during FOSDEM 2015 😦

Patterns in User activity for FOSDEM 2015

Consistency of Contributions : How correlated is the short term activity and long term activity of a contributor ?

Correlation between short term activity and long term activity (pre FOSDEM activity) : 0.99976042499094453 P value : 1.1504582302433539e-84

Correlation between short term activity and long term activity (post FOSDEM activity) : 0.99579135469119795 P value : 1.4403938083159664e-53

Short term and Long term activity of a contributor are highly positively correlated i.e. same behavior overall (high contribution in short term implies high contribution in long term)
We can see relatively less correlation in post FOSDEM activity i.e. jumps in activity levels of some contributors

Correlation of contribution Activity during the event to future behavior

Correlation between event activity and Short Term Activity Post event : 0.9929294720489632 P value : 5.9819168066219279e-48
Correlation between event activity and Long Term Activity Post event : 0.99952299446342929 P value : 3.441347571962578e-77

contributions during the event and after the event are very highly positively correlated i.e. more the contribution during FOSDEM, higher the contribution activity in future
Especially high correlation between event contributions and long time activity – High activity contributors tend to contribute highly during FOSDEM too ?

Impact of Event on Activity : Correlation between pre and post event activity

Correlation between pre and post event Short Term Activity : 0.99386844489943016 P value : 1.7160498882448765e-49
Correlation between pre and post event Long Term Activity : 0.999993249375565 P value : 2.0398511232841224e-123

Long term activity is very highly correlated as compared to short term activity – More impact of FOSDEM in short term as compared to long term ? but long term activity had more jumps between activity levels

Activity wise Contributor Classification of FOSDEM 2015 attendees

Short Term Activity

Out of 52 contributors who attended FOSDEM 2014, 8 contributors had an increase in their activity immediately after FOSDEM and jumped ‘up’ i.e. from lower activity groups before FOSDEM to higher activity groups after FOSDEM while 7 contributors had a decrease in activity immediately after FOSDEM and jumped ‘down’ i.e. classified into a lower activity region.

Long Term Activity

Out of 52 contributors who attended FOSDEM 2014, 12 contributors had an increase in their long term activity after FOSDEM and jumped ‘up’ i.e. from lower activity groups before FOSDEM to higher activity groups after FOSDEM while 4 contributors had a decrease in their long term activity after FOSDEM and jumped ‘down’ i.e. classified into a lower activity region.

Overall, in both short term and long term , number of contributors who had an increase in their level of contribution activity were higher than those who had a decrease.

It is also interesting to note that :

We can see a significant increase in contribution activity over long term rather than just short term(immediate) behavior.
In long term post FOSDEM , number of contributors in extremely high activity level (>5000 messages in one year ) is same as those in any other level and contributors are equally distributed within levels while prior to FOSDEM,there were very less contributors in high activity range.

FOSDEM 2016

Short Term Contribution Activity of FOSDEM 2016 attendees

Find the datagrepper charts link here . The timeline is from one month before the event till one month after the event.The middle of the timeline denotes FOSDEM. While there is a decrease in activity of FOSDEM 2016 attendees during FOSDEM itself, their contribution activity has increased immensely immediately after FOSDEM as compared to just before the event.

Long Term Contribution Activity of FOSDEM 2016 attendees

Just one month since the event hence no long-term analysis for FOSDEM 2016 !

Activity of Newcomers Onboarded from FOSDEM 2016

19 newcomers were onboarded during FOSDEM 2016.

Find the datagrepper charts link here .The timeline is from the ending of FOSDEM till current time(about a month afterwards). It is important to note that out of 19 newcomers onboarded during FOSDEM 2016 everyone has continued contributing post the event. While most have low contribution activity (<10 messages in a month following onboarding), three newcomers onboarded already have medium contribution activity. There has been a surge in activity about two weeks post FOSDEM but there has been no activity post that !

Needless to say, Newcomer Onboarding from FOSDEM 2016 has been a success ! However, we need more efforts to retain these new contributors.

Patterns in User activity for FOSDEM 2016

Correlation of contribution Activity during the event to future behavior

Correlation between event activity and Short Term Activity Post event : 0.99996831639782602 P value : 4.3112590423096029e-157

Increased correlation in contributions during FOSDEM 2016 and immediately after FOSDEM 2016 as compared to FOSDEM 2015 i.e. Event activity has started to resemble short term contribution behavior more !

Impact of Event on Activity : Correlation between pre and post event activity

Correlation between pre and post event Short Term Activity : 0.9999976975958108 P value : 3.1964456239779497e-199

Almost perfect correlation between pre and post event short term activity – Less Impact of FOSDEM 2016 in short term ?

Activity wise Contributor Classification of FOSDEM 2015 attendees

Short Term Activity

Out of 76 contributors who attended FOSDEM 2014, 19 contributors had an increase in their immediate activity after FOSDEM and jumped ‘up’ i.e. from lower activity groups before FOSDEM to higher activity groups after FOSDEM while 5 contributors had a decrease in their immediate activity after FOSDEM and jumped ‘down’ i.e. classified into a lower activity region.

While there have been greater number of jumps, the difference in their pre and post FOSDEM activities has not been much. Many of these contributors jumping between activity levels were border cases. Also, the jumps have been such that there has been an uneven distribution with more contributors having low to medium contribution activity.

Possible Future Work

In which areas do FOSDEM attendees generally contribute ?
Understand preferance evolution of contributors ? Has FOSDEM impacted contribution areas of attendees ? Perhaps more diverse contributions post FOSDEM ?

2015 in Numbers : Fedora CommOps

CommOps is the newest official sub-project in Fedora, and the team’s role is to assist other sub-projects in Fedora. This is done by building and improving interactions within the internal Fedora community, as well as by increasing communication across the Project as a whole. 2015 was an important milestone for the Fedora Community Operations (CommOps) team in so many ways. Remy DeCausemaker,the Fedora Community Action and Impact Lead, Justin Flory(jflory7) and the CommOps team as whole recently published an excellent Year-in-Review article on Fedora Community Blog describing the CommOps Team highlights of 2015 and their vision for the upcoming year of 2016.

I did crunch some numbers about the growth of CommOps in 2015 – however they could not be included in the article (which I feel is primarily my fault – I added them on etherpad but couldnt add them in the post since I was out of town and couldn’t find a WiFi connection with reasonable net speed). Nonetheless, I do feel the need for sharing the analytics and hence this article.

Fedmsg Activity of CommOps Team

The image shows CommOps fedmsg activity for 2015. This was taken in Jan and hence the sudden drop a month ago due to holiday season – but boy are we rising !

Check out the raw fedmsg activity of CommOps here and datagrepper visualization here . Other teams can generate this graph by replacing commops in the link by their most frequently used team name i.e. ….&contains=commops will become ….&contains=<TEAM_NAME_HERE>

Mailing List Activity of CommOps Team

You can check out the mailing list archives of CommOps here. Here is a quick graph of the activity on the CommOps mailing list for 2015 :

Some of the longest discussions on CommOps ML have revolved around :

5ftw article (11 comments 4 participants) – CommOps started contributing to etherpad containing possible 5ftw ideas for aticle by mattdm

Marketing meeting timings for 2016 discussion (8 comments , 5 participants) – a good number of CommOps team members are a part of marketing team too

Onboarding new contributors via Outreachy (7 comments 4 participants) – Outreachy is a program which aims at increasing diversity in FOSS. Fedora participated in Dec – March 2016 round with slots for CommOps and Hubs .

Community Blog status (7 comments 3 participants) – One of the biggest milestones of 2015 with Community Blog being launched ! Yaay ! 🙂

Some of the most participated threads have been :

Trac Guide ( 6 comments, 6 participants) – CommOps moved to Ticket based meetings

Fedora Elections(5 comments 5 partcipants) – CommOps helped with organizing Fedora Elections making it 4th most participated election in all time – Yaay ! I helped jkurik organize this round of elections and learnt so much !

Design Team article on CommBlog (5 comments 5 participants)

FLOCK Bids (5 comments, 4 participants)

IRC Activity of CommOps Team

While there are no records of interactions on IRC on team channels, meetings in open channels (#fedora-meeting, #fedora-meeting-1, #fedora-meeting-2 ) are recorded by meetbot. Worth mentioning here is that CommOps just became an official subproject in Fedora – so we now have our own place in meetbot logs.

CommOps started 7 IRC meetings in 2015 in #fedora-meeting-2 channel. You can find some of the meeting logs here and here.

The above graph shows the number of attendees and chairs amongst then in IRC meetings. While CommOps team meeting size has grown gradually, it is interesting to note that number of chairs has grown too – perhaps because team members are taking a more permanent role in workings of CommOps and are here to stay for long 🙂

Another interesting statistic is the lines spoken in the meeting by attendees where we can see that attendees are not just idle and that CommOps has very interactive meetings 🙂

All in all, the numbers assert that CommOps is a growing community with high interaction amongst its members.

Fedora Community Blog (CommBlog)

The first major accomplishment of CommOps as a sub-project was on November 9th with the announcement of the Community Blog ! Within a short span of three months, CommBlog has had 53 posts published with 11977 views and 38 comments till date.

CommBlog has 62 users in Fedora Community – 48 contributors , 4 editors and 1 author – with the top contributor to CommBlog being bee2502 with 4 posts ( thats me – but wait, what? where is jflory7? )

CommBlog had most views in a single day on 10 Nov 2015 with 1168 views in all. Fedora 24 release dates and schedule was published on CommBlog that day which generated 519 views on the first day itself The article is also incidentally the most viewed article on CommBlog with 1727 views in all. Wayland and Porting python packages to python-3 articles come in close second and third respectively.

Elections Retrospective article has the 5th highest views with other posts and candidate interviews being commented on 🙂 In terms of comments, IRC analytics article had the most number of comments (4 comments) while Porting python packages to python-3 article had the most number of pingbacks(5 pingbacks)

Another rising post on CommBlog is the Share your Year in Review article which is garnering a lot of attention 🙂

Check here for a detailed version of analytics related to CommBlog which contains insights on CommBlog viewers, their locations and search activity.

Want to Help?

Join our team in #fedora-commops on Freenode
Join the Community Operations Mailing List
Participate in our weekly meetings

2015 in Numbers : Fedora Community Blog

Fedora Community Blog (CommBlog)

CommBlog Users

Views and Comments on CommBlog articles

A few things I found interesting here are :

Also these Top 3 articles have > 1000 views while the others have < 300 views – which is still nice but a HUGE difference !
Wayland article is not SEO optimized and still has second highest views.(Perhaps many of our viewers do not come from search engines? Or somehow already know the article links ? More on this later in the post )

I would also like to mention here that Election related posts and interviews also gathered a lot of attention on CommBlog in terms of views as well as comments.

Another rising post on CommBlog is the Share your Year in Review article which is garnering a lot of attention 🙂

CommBlog Traffic and Social Media

It is also interesting to note that the number of viewers coming in through search engines are only a bit more than Magazine and Twitter.

Geographical Location of Viewers

Viewer Clicks and Search Terms

Viewers seems to be generally searching for Fedora 24 release dates or Election related updates.

Some things to ponder on / Future work :

A similar posts suggestion – even great if personalized
What type of posts are getting more traction and why ?
How to get contributors to engage more ?

Fedora – A peek into IRC meetings using meetbot data

Many Fedora projects and groups use IRC channels on irc.freenode.net for their regular meetings. (Know more about IRC here) Generally, meetings take place in one of the three fedora-meeting channels, #fedora-meeting, #fedora-meeting-1 and #fedora-meeting-2. However, there is no requirement that a meeting take place in these channels only. Many ad-hoc or one-time meetings take place in other channels. Such meetings in IRC channels are normally logged. There is a Meetbot IRC bot in every channel to assist with running meetings, meeting summaries and logging. (Know more about meetbot here and check out the summaries and logs of past meetings on Fedoraproject Meetbot page here .) To help meeting attendees, Meetbot provides a set of commands like #startmeeting , #endmeeting , #info , #help , #link etc.

With a aim to gather information about Fedora IRC meetings and especially understand about how Fedora contributors interact in these meetings, I turn towards Datagrepper. Datagrepper is a JSON API that lets you query the history of the Fedora Message bus or fedmsg for corresponding data. (Know more about Datagrepper here ). Here is a quick look of raw feed of Datagrepper from fedmsg bus with messages for topics like buildsys.rpm.sign and buildsys.task.state.change :

fedmsg has a few meetbot-related topics corresponding to meetbot commands using which I gather daily,weekly and monthly IRC meeting data. You can construct queries for a time period by specifying by the start and end parameters for the query.Use count variable from JSON data dump to get total number of messages pertaining to our query. (Check out the meetbot-related fedmsg topics here and documentation for constructing queries for Datagrepper here ). You can also use Datagrepper Charts API for some basic visualizations. (Check it out here).

meetbot.meeting.start : Messages on this topic get published when an IRC meeting starts.(using #startmeeting meetbot command)

meetbot.meeting.complete : Messages on this topic get published when an IRC meeting ends.(using #endmeeting meetbot command) .

On an average, 99 IRC meetings take place in a month over different channels.(The mean #IRC meetings started monthly is 98 while mean #IRC meetings completed monthly is 100) During December – February, this value has dropped considerably. After looking at weekly #of IRC meetings started as well as completed, we can see that the drop in #IRC meetings in December can attributed due to two weeks during Christmas season( #IRC meetings started start dropping approximately week before Christmas and continue till after New Years).

Weekly mean for #IRC meetings started is 23.05(median 26 highest 33) while that for completed IRC meetings is 23.51.(Median 27 Highest 35) Also, #IRC meetings is particularly low(mostly zero IRC meetings started/completed per day) during Mar 11-18 2015 and Jan 28-Feb 1 and Feb 7-15 2015 ( Bot Outage?) .

On a normal weekday, generally 3-4 meetings are started/completed. Saturdays have lower values(~1-2) and no meetings are generally held on Sundays.(The average #IRC meetings per day started is 3 while that of #IRC meetings completed is 3.3 and the median for both is 4.) Highest value for #IRC meetings started as well as completed across different channels occurred on 23rd March 2015 (Started 11 Completed 14) – Monday(next working day) after a week with particularly low #IRC meetings. (Mar 11-18 2015)

Using daywise percentage stacked representation, we see that #IRC meetings started and completed is generally the same(started and completed have equal percentage) thus allowing us to conclude that meetings are generally of small durations(less than 24 hrs).The small delta in #IRC meetings started and completed can be attributed to the IRC meetings overlapping between two periods.Also, the deviations caused are during the weeks where #IRC meetings started/completed is very low and hence the large percentage value i.e. Mar 11-18 IRC meetings started is 1 ,but meetings completed is 0, hence 100% of total is due to meetings started(complete blue streak in the graph for such a case).

For visualizations generated using Datagrepper Charts API :

Check here for meetbot.meeting.start

Check here for meetbot.meeting.complete

meetbot.meeting.topic.update : Messages on this topic get published when meeting topic is updated.(using #topic command)

This is correlated with #IRC meetings with very low values occur in December to March period and in the weeks where #IRC meetings(started/completed) is particularly low. The monthly average for topic update messages generated during IRC meetings is 556.16 (median value is 618 and highest no. of topic.update messages in a month is 708). Weekly mean is 130 messages(median value is 143 and highest no. of topic.update messages in a week is 202).

On an average, 18 topic.update messages are published per day(median value 20) with highest messages published on July 19, 2015(56 messages) .Plotting the daywise average topic.update messages per IRC meeting(we consider #topic.update messages/#IRC meetings started as meeting duration is generally less than a day), we can see that generally meeting topics are updated 4-5 times per meeting (mean 4.07, median 4.71) but there have also been 11-12 average topic updates per IRC meeting.

You can also find visualizations generated using Datagrepper Charts API for meetbot.meeting.topic.update here.

meetbot.meeting.item.help : Messages on this topic get published when attendees call for help on items.(using #help meetbot command). This topic was introduced in March end and hence previous values are not available.

The help command, as been by the graphs, is rarely used by IRC meeting attendees with only being used once per month in the past two months.

For Visualizations generated using Datagrepper Charts API for meetbot.meeting.item.help , Check here.

meetbot.meeting.item.link : Messages on this topic get published when attendees link information to an item(using #link meetbot command). This topic was introduced in March end and hence previous values are not available.

The monthly average number of items linked is 404(median 465) and highest number of items linked in the past year is 567.The weekly average number of items linked is 104.25(median 109) and highest number of items linked in the past year is 183.

On an average, 14 items are linked to in IRC meetings in a day with highest being 61 item linkings within a single day. Also, in an IRC meeting,generally 3-4 items are linked to with 14 being the highest number of items linked to in an IRC meeting.

For visualizations generated using Datagrepper Charts API for meetbot.meeting.item.link, Check here.

Meeting Attendees and Chairs : To get an overview of statistics related to the Fedora contributers attending IRC meetings(attendees and chairs both),I used the meetbot.meeting.complete messages(meetbot.meeting.start messages only show the initial attendees). I used the data for past three months(Aug-Oct 2015)

During the past 3 months, 337 IRC meetings have taken place.On an average, 10 people attended an IRC meeting including the chairs and the mean for size of group of chairs was 4.67 for an IRC meeting(mean 4.67 median 5). Also the largest meeting in the past three months comprised of 27 attendees and the largest group of chairs included 10 Fedora contributors.

Other Questions to ask :

1.Is there any specific time period in day when IRC meetings generally occur ?

2.Are any channels specifically used? Especially what % of meetings are conducted on channels #fedora-meeting, #fedora-meeting-1 , #fedora-meeting-2 ? Is the distribution of meetings within this channel equal ?

3.Are item.link messages generated equivalently by both chairs and non-chairs or is the message generation partial ?

4.Are topic.help messages generated in the past only due to a specific set of users always using this command?

Also check out @threebean ‘s blog posts on Datagrepper here. He is one of the super awesome people behind fedmsg and Datagrepper.

Here is a fun word cloud visualization of IRC meeting attendees over past three months ( Fedora CommOps seems to be very active – can see a lot of CommOps members here @decause , @threebean , @mattdm , @lmacken and @jflory7 and @mailga too !! Yayy !! )

Fedora for Newbies – Fedora Badges

Are you interested in contributing to Fedora but cannot figure out where to start ? or Do you just want to take a look around the Fedora Project ? While you can surely go about exploring the wiki pages, Fedora Badges is another fantastic and fun way to explore the different aspects of the Fedora Project – and you earn Badges and points along the way ! This post records my journey of joining Fedora and starting to collect badges to finally being ranked in the Top 10 percentile of all Fedora Users, being Top User on Fedora Badges Weekly Leaderboard and Second on Fedora Badges Monthly Leaderboard – All in a short span of a two days! Yaay Me ! While I spent about 2-3 hrs over two days, you could finish this in less than a day if you explore for a longer period.

What is Fedora Badges ? Fedora Badges is a fantastic system built to incentivize Fedora contributors and recognize activity by awarding contributors a variety of badges. Check it out here. As you can see, Fedora Badges is not just for newbies but it does provide an excellent platform to explore the different aspects of Fedora Project. After doing some rudimentary analysis on the badges community, @decause from the Fedora CommOps team ( check out their awesome work here) has compiled a list of the most common badges that are awarded for signing up for accounts and participating at a base level in the project. ( You can read more about it here ). I went about gathering some of these badges (I haven’t yet completed all those mentioned in the list) and a few others in the past two days and you could too !

BABY BADGER : Check out the Baby Badger Badge here. This badge is awarded to newcomers to Fedora Badges on first login into the Fedora Badges system. You need to login using your Fedora Account System(FAS) account. To sign up on FAS, create an account here. Login on the Fedora Badges page here using your FAS account details and check out your first Badge! You are now a proud Baby Badger,my friend !

PARANOID PANDA : Check out the Paranoid Panda Badge here. This badge is awarded to users on updating their FAS account password. All you need to do is update your default FAS password to one of your choice to get this badge.You can update the password using the account verification link sent in mail or by logging into the FAS account.

INVOLVEMENT : Check out the Involvement Badge here. This badge is awarded to users on signing the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement(FPCA). Know more about it here. This badge means that the user is now legally eligible to contribute to Fedora.

By now, you must be in the top 50% of the ~18k Fedora Badges users. Congrats! We will now work on updating the FAS account to collect some more badges. To collect the next three badges, you need to edit your FAS account details. To edit your account details, Login to FAS > My Account > Click on Edit option beside Account details .To collect the badges, please ensure that the privacy flag is unchecked.

WHITE RABBIT : Check out the White Rabbit Badge here. This badge is awarded to users who have updated their timezone on FAS thus allowing other FAS users to sync with them.

CRYPTO BADGER : Check out the badge here. This badge is awarded to users who have updated their RSA SSH public key to their FAS account. To generate the RSA SSH public key, use the following command

ssh-keygen -t rsa

Users need to upload the .pub file to FAS account. Please remember your passphrase which you need to commit contributions and it cannot be recovered if you forget it. This badge ensures that the host can access all the Fedora servers and resources securely.

CRYPTO PANDA : Check out the badge here. This badge is awarded to users who have updated their GPG key to their FAS account. Read this to know about creating GPG keys. This badge means data communication by the user can be checked for authenticity.

RIDDLE ME THIS : Check out the badge here. This badge is awarded to users who have updated their Security Question on FAS account. This badge ensures that Account Recovery is possible even if user forgets the password.

LET ME INTRODUCE MYSELF : Check out the badge here . This badge is awarded to users on creating their profile page on Fedora Wiki. To create and edit your Fedora Wiki Profile Page , Login here using your FAS account details > Click on Username > Edit . Save to setup your Fedora Wiki User Profile. This badge shows that user has created a wiki page to engage with the Fedora community.

MUGSHOT : Check out the badge here. This is a fun badge given to users when they personalize their Open Id account with a Libravatar. Login here using Open Id account to create your personalized and fun Libravatar. On creation of FAS account, an Open Id account is automatically generated for you. Know more about it here. When trying to log on to an OpenID enabled site, give

username.id.fedoraproject.org

as URL.

By now, your FAS account and Fedora Wiki User Profile Page is setup and personalized and you must be in the top 20% of the ~18k Fedora Badges users. Congrats! Till now all of the badges we have collected except Let me Introduce Myself are Community Badges. Community Badges are used to incentivize engagement in Fedora community. Check out Community Badges here. We will now work on exploring the different aspects of Fedora ecosystem.

FEDORA TAGGER

Fedora Tagger allows you to suggest and vote on tags for Fedora packages.Know more about it here. The voting system is especially fun and very addictive and I felt it somewhat resembles Tinder but for Fedora utilities instead. It was especially knowledgeable and I got to know a lot about the different packages available for Fedora. I didnt know Fedora had so many linear programming libraries as well as so many fun games.(I really am a newbie 😦 ) I also suggested a tag for Hangman game and I really wish my tag remains.( My tag was ‘game’ 😛 ). Login to the Fedora Tagger and start collecting Tagger-related Badges while improving the quality of Fedora utilities tags simultaneously !

JUNIOR TAGGER : Check out the badge here. Fedora Tagger newcomers who have voted on 10+ tags for packages in Fedora Tagger are awarded this badge to reward their contribution to quality improvement of tags as well as ensure continued participation on Fedora Tagger.
JUNIOR PACKAGE TAGGER : Check out the badge here.Fedora Tagger newcomers who have suggested a new tag for a package in Fedora Tagger are awarded this badge to reward their contribution to quality improvement of tags as well as ensure continued participation on Fedora Tagger.

I also collected the Tagger badge which is given when you vote on 50+ tags (check it out here) – The website was just so addictive ! As you can see, Fedora Tagger badges are mostly Quality Badges meant to reward those working on improving the quality of Fedora releases. Quality Badges are comprised of Tester and Tagger Badges. Tester Badges incentivize users who test Fedora Releases for bugs. Check out the Quality Badges here .

ASK FEDORA

Ask Fedora is the Fedora Q & A site to solve your doubts. Check it out here. Know more about it here.

CURIOUS PENGUIN : Check out the badge here. Ask Fedora newcomers are awarded this badge on asking their first question to incentivize participation in Ask Fedora but that doesn’t mean you should go about asking irrelevant or repeated questions just for the sake of it – your questions can get downvoted and karma points will also be decreased.

Ask Fedora Badges are used to reward community engagement and hence they are are Community Badges.

Some other types of Badges apart from Community Badges and Quality Badges include Content Badges, Development Badges and Event Badges.

Content Badges : Awarded to Fedora users for creating or curating design content(Badges) as well as information content(Fedora Magazine and Editors)

Development Badges : Awarded to Fedora developers on submitting patches, completing builds or pushing updates.

Event Badges : Used to incentivize participation in Fedora events or conferences.

Explore different types of Badges here.

I was also awarded a JUNIOR BADGER Badge . Check it out here. It is a milestone badge awarded to users on collecting 10+ badges. By now, you must surely be in the Top 10% of Fedora Badges Users! Congrats, you made it ! You have set up your FAS account and Fedora Wiki Profile, you have explored the Fedora ecosystem a little including Fedora Wiki, Fedora Tagger and Ask Fedora and have collected so many badges along the way. Cheers! Hope you collect many more Badges from now on and here is a preview of some badges waiting for you ..

Show your ❤ Like. Comment. Share. Reblog.

Note : I am working on adding Planet Fedora and related badges to this blogpost.

Edit 1 : If you update the fields in your FAS account while signing up, you might not get the corresponding badges. That’s because you first create your user account, the system sends only the username field from the information you fill via fedmsg( Fedora Infrastructure Message Bus). Fedora Badges takes advantage of fedmsg(Fedora Infrastructure’s Message Bus) and datanommer to determine what kinds of contributions a person is making (Read more about how Fedora Badges work here)and hence Badges is not able to recognize the information in all the other fields which you fill while signing up and correspondingly award you the required badge. Dont fret though! You can still get that Badge you have been vying for! As a workaround — you can just set that field to something else – save it – and then set it back again, and (fingers crossed) you should get the badge !

Also check out this link for info about communicating and getting help around Fedora