Commitfest Application unconference notes

As noted in the previous thread, we had a fairly productive conversation
about the commitfest application at the unconference in PGConf.Asia. Here
are my notes from that session, which included (among others) several patch
authors, a commitfest manager, as well as Magnus, Joe Conway and Dave Page
from the infra team.

The goal of the session was to discuss ways that the commitfest app might
help encourage people to do more reviewing, as well as to identify
usability issues for average commitfest users. (We concluded that the
present task of the commitfest manager can be a little bit fiddly but is
not burdensome.)

Here's an accounting of the issues with some suggested improvements:

# Determining what to review

## Does a patch have consensus around design/approach on the list?

There is an annotation mechanism that doesn't get much use right now.
Consider adding comments / annotations more obviously during patch
attachment and/or state changes. Consider adding a new patch state like
"Under Consideration" which a patch starts in before going to "Ready for
Review".

## Is the patch readable / testable / difficult / easy?

It can be tricky to figure out which patch to apply, and there's no "stats
at a glance" to help a reviewer guess how relevant a patch might be to
their interests / experience / available time. Consider adding some patch
details like patch file size on the review. Consider automatically trying
to apply any patch that gets posted to the CF app to the current HEAD at
some interval and complain if it doesn't work.

## Does the patch already have enough review coverage?

Sometimes a more junior reviewer might benefit from additional review by a
more experienced community member. Some patches really need many eyes on
them to cover different issues. Sometimes a reviewer might grab a patch and
then get too busy to follow through. Automatically reviewing idle reviewers
from patches might encourage follow-through, as would some form of
automated nagging.

## Do people know about the commitfest app? How to submit patches? (etc)

The developers FAQ and wiki could use a good edit and stream-lining.
Finding the commitfest app is a subtle thing. Once you do find the app, the
patch submission form doesn't necessarily prompt or fill in information as
smoothly as it could.

## Should we nag people more?

Attention is a limited quantity and we should be respectful of people's
time and attention, but we could give people a way to opt into reminders
when review periods start or to remind them they signed up to review a
patch. (Perhaps signing up for a review could include a date you promise to
have reviewed the patch by?)

## Landing Page Redesign

The current landing page has some confusing terminology and doesn't really
take advantage of being the default page. With a little bit of work we
could probably build a personal view of the world which showed your patches
in review, the reviews you've committed to, and the upcoming relevant dates
for the future. Specifically "Future", "Open" and "In Progress" were
highlighted as potentially confusing terms. and "Planned", "Open for
Submissions" and "In Review" were suggested as alternatives.

-p

There were probably other notes -

--
Peter van Hardenberg
San Francisco, California
"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."—Kurt Vonnegut