As brought up in chat, we should align our groups/roles here in the forum and in the chat. Here’s the relevant discussion so far, for further reference (from #general-development):
J5lx: Ah, almost forgot about this. @Pencil2D Team as I mentioned in #general I created some groups on the forum to match our Discord roles (inspired by @scribblemaniac’s suggestion to have Discord roles and forum groups synced), however I wasn’t quite sure about the contribution related roles, so here we go:
is developers meant for regular code contributors / those who have contributed more than a few times?
can non-Pencil2D Team members be developers (because all current developers are also team members)?
does contributors include non-code contributors?
J5lx: And generally, how is contributors related to developers and Pencil2D Team, are any of them mutually exclusive?
J5lx: In particular I’m also asking this because I’m wondering which groups people should be able to join and leave freely, which ones should have join requests enabled and which ones should be closed
J5lx: For reference, the “classic” forum groups up until now are developers (for regular code contributors as above), support (for those who “contribute“ user support) and translators for those who have meaningfully contributed to the translations. I didn’t put all that much thought into this though, I was mostly just familiarising myself with the groups feature. In particular, the translators groups is still completely empty except for me (though this might also be in part due to lack of promotion)
J5lx: Of those groups, both developers and translators have join requests enabled
J5lx: So I’m kinda wondering how the developer group and role would relate and also if translators should just be a part of contributors
J5lx: I hope this wall of text isn’t too confusing
J5lx: (BTW I’m also looking into the possibility of syncing the groups with discord roles but I’m not making any promises yet)
scribblemaniac: That’s a lot of questions.
scribblemaniac: I think that the Pencil2D Team should be the only group that should be closed or join requested. Then we do not have to decide when people have contributed “enough” to code or whatever else to qualify for the group.
scribblemaniac: I would say that contributors is specifically for non-code contributors, although it would not be mutually exclusive with the developer group since people can develop and contribute in other ways. The group may be too broad as it is now. I think a distinct group for translators could be useful.
scribblemaniac: I think that covers my initial thoughts on the matter.
[…]
JoseMoreno: @J5lx@scribblemaniac Hey. Thanks for helping out so early. I just managed to sit on my computer due to some difficulties. Hmm In github there are a few roles that represent the level of commitment with the project. For example, new people that report for their first time, do not have a role assigned. People who have committed something have the contributor role assigned to them, and members of the project organization are just referred as members . When I created the contributors group in here I was thinking of the contributor role in github, but you guys are right, people can contribute to things that are not related to coding (like documentation, promotional media, etc) Initially the developer category was for anyone who coded Pencil2D, either as a member (of the org) or as a collaborator (an external member). I agree with a translators group, however the translators are too few and I’m not sure all of them are here, so having that seems like categorization over-managing. However if you agree to having the group I don’t really see a problem with it. I also agree to having the pencil2d role locked and be a request-only elite group of superhumans role If you want me to change some of the groups to better reflect those of the forum let me know. I think you guys can do it too (since you are in the “op” category) but i’ll gladly help whenever.
As for my thoughts as of now, I think we can drop @translators, it’s a group I created mostly on a whim and as Jose said that could really be over-management. Instead we could have a contributor role/group encompassing everyone who made any sort of (meaningful?) contribution to the project. Now the open questions would be, who counts as a developer (as above, and do they also inherently count as contributors), should contributors+developers be open or request-only and in the latter case, when does somebody “qualify” for contributors/developers? Thoughts?
Maybe we’re even being too specific with a developers group? Any of the main developers will also have the Pencil2D Team group/role so that should be sufficient to indicate their level of involvement and experience with Pencil2D. For developers that are not part of the main team, a separate group is almost implying that their contributions are more important than those of people who contribute documentation, translations, etc. and get lumped together into the Contributor group.
Thank you both. I agree not wanting to overcomplicate the roles. So perhaps the translation thing can be sort of a visual “badge of honor” more than a definite role group (if that’s possible)
I also agree that having a separate developer vs code-contributor group might be a bit odd as opposed to a pencil2d team vs general contributor group. At least in most FOSS projects I’ve seen the latter is normal when is seen in the context of the code contributions, and github separates the organization members (usually developers) from the occasional contributors, so I don’t think it’s inconvenient to go down that path either.
Thinking pragmatically about this though, without devs these kind of projects wouldn’t amount to anything, so in a way their contributions are mandatory; a primary human resource FOSS projects are required to run on if you will (seen from a project management POV), while documentation should be done primarily by developers, translations are a niche requirement requested and often supplied by a specific group of people, if developers don’t have the required skills, and while any assistance in those areas is certainly appreciated, it is nevertheless optional to keep the project running as a whole. We also have to consider that the frequency of such contributions are also different, because a developer is always far more active than a translator or a documentation assistant due to the changing nature of the code.
Anyway I’m not opposed to open and rename the developers group to a “contributors” group, but at the same time from a user perspective a developer role does provide a distinctive mental image in the user’s perception of the organization (users use, devs dev; it’s like the cycle of life, heh), as opposed to a volunteer contributor that can sporadically help with many and all those things scribblemaniac noted (docs, translations, bug reports, graphic design etc), which will be credited for sure, but are not noticed unless they are inquired about. I mean I doubt anyone cared about how cool the logo design was in comparison to how pencil2d kept crashing and ruined their projects (past tense)
I personally don’t think having a distinctive role for devs would or should be seen as some kind of knee-jerk circle elitism, it’s a programming based project after all, but rather it should serve as a guide for users and contributors to let them know who’s involved with the code and who isn’t, in case support is required.
So perhaps we could open for all source-code-related contributors and leave (maybe we can rename it to project helper or assistant ?) for any other task related to the well-being of the project?
