Open Source Dev: 06.01.2018

Conversation with Spoke project (moveon.org) (6/1/18)

HISTORY

• Started as a closed project within Bernie campaign - Coders for Bernie
• Moveon negotiated with them to adopt the codebase - last April / March 2017
• Open-sourced it July 2017 - came to them kind of gnarly - took a bit of work to get it into shape
• Working in production (in the open) Sept 2017
• Forked by Australian marriage equality campaign
  • Pulling in Australian company’s changes was actually tough, they should have just rewritten the features
• But they were interested in maintaining the story of provenance - both internally and externally - there is value in that
  • He suggests that our story is also about transparency in government
• Open source ‘is a strategy’ that takes a lot of time
  • 'The first six months in the open is a lot of work’ - you’re doing more work than getting benefit
  • A question of resource management - it is very intensive
  • Make it ‘newbie-ready’ - this takes a lot of work up front

HACKATHON NOV 2017

• … as forcing function for newcomer experience
• Suddenly had 10-20 ppl trying to install it all at once
• ‘I got to see all the things they ran into’
• ‘If you asked me at that point whether this was worth open sourcing the project, I’d said 'I think we should give it six months, but not yet …''
• They got two really strong contributors
  • A few really committed developers - one guy on paternity leave ‘who was bored’ - haha sigh.

FROM 1 USERS TO N USERS

• 'You’re going to be in the wilderness for a while'
• Recommendation: find a partner or organization that is another compelling user of the code
  • Their users are organizations, not individual users (similar to us)
  • At 2 users, the codebase is suddenly forced to be generic
• Now over a 100 campaigns using it (!)
  • SEIU, Working Families Party, …
  • Super contributors = 5-7 people
  • 1 feature submitted = 15
  • Installed Codebase = 100
• Make it super easy - make campaigns ‘not afraid of the software'
  • They made a ‘one-click heroku button’ to set up
  • Youtube video to ‘setup spoke in 10 min’
  • Run test suite, sample data (include sample data)
  • They were 'performing in public’ - in the slack channel, they would work with people to get things up and running ‘publicly’
• ‘Sales funnel’
  • They’re competing with actual vendors (like us)
  • ‘This is as close to any kind of promotion you will ever see from us’
    • **opensource.moveon.org —> easy to pitch to your boss - like a ‘vendor website’ **
    • ‘This saved us $100k’ etc. and here’s how to contact us
  • "100 learn about it, 10 will say they will, 1 will actually do something"

TRACKING SUCCESS / MEASURING COMMUNITY

• Tracking activity in the slack channel
• Tracks activity in GitHub repo (notifications)
  • People are super intimidated and he tries to eliminate or reduce intimidation / imposter syndrome
  • ‘Just commenting makes us happy’
  • ‘You can mark your work ‘work in progress’ and we’ll help you get it over the finish line’
  • Be explicit about encouraging people to engage
• Doesn’t look at forks, ‘though I should’
  • **Actually prefers that people run code off master - unmergable forks are an indication of ‘a sad open source project’ **

COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT

• Asked one of the contributors to run the community themself - he basically escalated the power of this one individual, and it solidified that person’s commitment
• I didn’t want to say to people ‘Give me your email address’ - he said ‘go to this issue and comment on it!’ and he knows that GitHub will email them with notifications on the issue, and that he has their handle on GitHub
• Matches contributors to new orgs who need features - suggests that org pays dev, and then merges changes back up

TELLING A STORY

• **‘Theory of Change’ **- he abbreviates this as TOC
• Story that you tell others: ‘If you do X, change will happen’ - meta level is important for folks to understand their impact (and want to contribute)
• Very simple and quick pitch - it should be really clear
• Highlighting customers through the work that the tech enables (‘changed outcomes for healthcare in Alabama through the election’) - how it actually impacted people

DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE

• Dev should be up and running in 10min - 30min max.
• How to deal with dependencies on external services
  • Spoke is dependent on telephony, authentication for end-to-end experience
  • The readme says very explicitly that if you want an end-to-end setup, you will need to interface with third party services
    • They have to keep updating readme as third party services change (‘super annoying’)
  • Make it easier for folks to develop locally by stubbing out third party services
    • e.g. for twilio connection, he stubbed out a fake service so that you can actually run everything locally and get a ‘reply’ that looks like a text message - for local dev and testing
  • The ‘airplane test’ - can you develop and run things locally in a meaningful way (on an airplane)
• Good first issues
  • ‘Even though it would have taken me five minutes to fix the bug, I just filed the bug as ‘good first issue’ instead so others could pick it up’
  • Important to have these ready for hackathon
  • **In each issue, write out which files will be touched in this issue **
  • Think about the junior developer who has never before contributed to an open source project

HACKATHON LOGISTICS

• Before hackathon - they had 2 people install the codebase beforehand and get feedback - ‘some stranger needs to go from zero to X on their own before you take it to a hackathon’
• At Hackathon - grouped people into 2s and 3s to do the install together
• ‘Abortion Access’ hackathon in NY is a really strong example
  • If you can bring someone who is a user of the software - not a developer, but someone who uses it, and if they can attend with you, it creates a motivation
• Have issues ready - good first issues list needs to be prepped - 5-10 issues that could be completed in less than a day (a new person can do it)
• Goals & success metrics
  • He’s looking at whether people had a good experience
  • ‘I could write that code in 5 minutes, so it’s not about the code’
  • You’re trying to get people into to the project, or just coding for a good cause - evangelism around open source
  • Lower the barrier to engaging with open source project
  • At best, one person in the hackathon will continue working on the project - 'that’s a great success'
  • 'Go wide'