Eclipse Community Survey: 4 More Insights

Ian blogged 6 insights from this year's Eclipse Community Survey; here are a few more to get us to a full Top Ten list.

1. What is your primary operating system?
   
   Linux is certainly a strong player in both development (26%) and deployment (40%), beating Mac (7% and 3%) but losing to Windows (64% and 38%). More interesting to me is the fragmentation of Linux, showing that Ubuntu beats RHEL/Fedora by 10% in the desktop space (development), but loses in the server space (deployment).


2. Where do you typically go to find Eclipse-related information?
   
   About 2/3rds said Google and/or the Eclipse home page, which suggests that the homepage has certainly improved - but a lot of people would rather just search. However, the survey didn't mention our finely crafted wiki.eclipse.org, or help.eclipse.org. Survey #FAIL.


3. Are you or the organization you work for a member of the Eclipse Foundation?
   
   Five out of six respondents (83%) said No. So either we've done a terrible job of converting users into members, or people would rather give back in the form of testing, documentation, filing bugs, and writing articles. I suspect it's a little of both, but mostly the former.
   
   Kudos to the contributors, and shame on the corporate drones for not convincing their queen to send a little honey back to Eclipse.


4. In the last year, how have you participated in the Eclipse community?
   
   While nearly a quarter of respondents (24%) said "I entered at least one bug into Bugzilla", more than 2/3rds said they "used Eclipse but didn't actively participate in the community." To me that's a clear sign we have more users than contributors. Is that because most Eclipse users are Windows folks who don't grok that Open Source works best when everyone sees themselves as part of the process, rather than just a consumer?

I've been reading More Joel On Software recently, thanks to winning a prize for bringing a bag purchased in Alaska to EclipseCon this past March. One article stands out from there in this context, Building Communities with Software, from March 2003. Here's an excerpt:

The social scientist Ray Oldenburg talks about how humans need a third place, besides work and home, to meet with friends, have a beer, discuss the events of the day, and enjoy some human interaction. Coffee shops, bars, hair salons, beer gardens, pool halls, clubs, and other hangouts are as vital as factories, schools and apartments ["The Great Good Place", 1989]. But capitalist society has been eroding those third places, and society is left impoverished.

...

So it's no surprise that so many programmers, desperate for a little human contact, flock to online communities - chat rooms, discussion forums, open source projects, and Ultima Online. In creating community software, we are, to some extent, trying to create a third place.

If you feel your third place is lacking, please consider contributing more to Eclipse, to Fedora or CentOS, to JBoss Tools, or whatever tickles your fancy. Just give something back. Your community will thank you, since, after all, "A rising tide lifts all boats."

UPDATE, 2009/05/30: Mike's right, calling our users "freeloaders" isn't fair. I just wish there was a more obvious way to convert users into contributors.

And the plan said...

With everyone's standardized project plans due next week, I've been tasked to draft a consistent workflow for the Modeling projects. And because we're such Model Citizens, I'd like to share it with others, in case this approach works for your project too. See details here.

On that note...

And the plan said usability, motherhood, apple pie
So I shined up my Chrome
Logged into the Bugz and I went in to run a query
It came back with a list of items, too many to possibly do
So I flagged a few, set milestones, and voom!
A plan came into view

woah!

(Chorus)
Plan, plan everywhere a plan
Charting out development, done for The Man
Do this, can't do that, did you read the plan?

And the plan said a lot of these
Have been deferred outta sight
So I looked at those bugs and thought to myself,
Hey! I'll submit a patch tonight
To contribute to this project or to get some new feature in
If God was here, he'd tell you to your face,
Thanks, man you're some kinda winner

Chorus

Now, hey you Mister! Can't you read?
You ain't got to be a committer to get a seat
You can write a patch, or build a new feature,
Ain't supposed to be hard
Plan says anyone can contribute,
Just look for the 'helpwanted' keyword!

And the plan said everybody welcome
Come in, site down and code
But when they passed around the hat
At the end of it all,
I didn't have a buck to unload
So I got me an account with Blogger
And I made up my own little site
I said thank you Eclipse for thinking about me,
I'm alive and you're alright

Chorus x 2

Five Man Electrical Band - Signs

Incidentally, there are over 2500 open 'helpwanted' bugs, with over 1100 closed. Thanks to everyone who's contributed over the years!

M & 3s

You and I should get away for a while
I just want to be alone with your smile
Download some features and plugins to update the IDE
We'll blast the stereo and we'll build with PDE

Because when I'm with you there's nothing I couldn't do
I just want to be your only fool
I'm grasping out at straws thinking back to what I saw
That night I tried to use that other tool

IRC was getting so bland
There are only so many ways to type '~faq' with one hand
Sometimes it makes me want to laugh
Sometimes I want to take the toaster in the bath

Because when we're with you there's nothing we couldn't do
And now it's time to share that love
We all oughta be testin' out Gany M3
Cuz there's no free help coming down from above

Who wants to live the bleeding edge?
I want to to live the bleeding edge.
Are you going to help testin'
Or are you assuming it'll work out in the end?

Blink 182 - M & Ms

Burn The Evidence

I recently graffiti'd the Eclipse Planning Counncil Agenda with my $0.02 because I saw something I felt was incorrect. Not being one to posture and postulate wildly w/o facts to back myself up, I also created this supporting document: EMF 2.3 Plan History.

Why? Because on a recent blog entry, Bjorn brought up some excellent suggestions about having a good communication strategy so that your consuming teams (users, developers) can properly be made aware of lumps in the gravy.

At first I was annoyed, because I thought he was throwing rocks at EMF. But because I know we did damn near everything but sending up smoke signals to get the message out, I'd like to instead underscore all the places you can document and announce your plans to help grow your community:

• Architecture Council (meetings + minutes on website)
• Planning Council (meetings + minutes on website)
• Europa/Ganymede meetings (meetings + minutes on website)
• website (4 places: home, news, downloads, docs -- reuse information widgets or database content to be able to inform people in many ways)
• Eclipse wiki (project page, project category page)
• project newsgroups -- don't be afraid to cross-post to related newsgroups
• Cross Projects mailing list (cross-projects-issues-dev@)
• Planning Council mailing list (eclipse.org-planning-council@)

We have no favourite channel. We use them all. Sure, it's a lot of work and could be construed as overkill, but IMHO it's worth the cost because it shows project maturity and respect for the people who use your code. Need a more instant-gratification or cost-benefits-analysis rationalization than the warm-fuzzy-feelings one? How about free testing? Tell people about your planned changes and they can adapt faster -- and give you feedback sooner.

Oh, well, time to crank up some Billy Talent and let the weekend begin.

Help me help y'all

Hey there, cowpokes! Do you spend long days and longer nights wondering how to get your code to work? Eclipse got you down? Feel like there's no one to turn to for help?

Well, friends, look no further!

Y'see friends, one fine day I was hanging out in #eclipse and was amazed at the sheer volume of quickly answerable questions coming in from Eclipse fans like y'selves -- questions already well documented! Now, I'm not talking about questions about CTRL-3 and the several hundred blogs singing its praises -- no sir! I'm talking about real -- and real easy -- questions like 'How do I start Eclipse?' or 'What's the deal with gcj?' or 'How can I solve my memory problems?'

Now, I know it's sometimes hard to know where to turn in a moment of crisis, and the internet can be a mighty scary and complex place for a greenhorn at times. We've all been there.

And so, without further ado, I give ya'll: my Top N List of places to go to for help...

1. Read The FAQs: IRC FAQ, Eclipse FAQs, More FAQs
2. Learn about the tools/projects you use from their websites
3. Ask a question in the newsgroups
4. Submit a question / discuss an issue / keep up to date in the mailing lists
5. Browse source code in CVS to find an existing solution
6. Read the online ISV help docs and APIs at help.eclipse.org
7. Read articles, blogs, and other resources
8. Watch videos of demos, walkthrus, and howtos
9. Find, report, patch, triage, fix, or verify a bug or feature request
10. Search with Eclipse or Google
11. Seek legal advice about 3rd party code and IP
12. Ask a question or discuss an issue in real time in #eclipse on freenode

But wait! That's not all! As if by coincidence, most of the items in the above list are also ways to contribute to Eclipse and the community. Once you find your answer, pay it forward by blogging about it, writing or expanding a wiki entry, contributing to a FAQ, answering a questing in a newsgroup or hanging out in #eclipse to help others.

Hell, ya'll could volunteer to be testers and take a few minutes to report a detailed bug -- with steps to reproduce, platform/config details, screen shots, logs, JUnits, and/or patches (as appropriate). Or, if you prefer to squash bugs than to unearth them, participate in BugDay. Want to start your own project? Check out next year's Google's Summer of Code and start contributing now!

Now I expect you're asking yourself, "Self, here comes the sales pitch where they ask for all mah hard earned greenbacks." But thanks to the magic of Open Source... everything you see before ya'll is free. Free as in 'free beer' -- open, transparent, and ultimately funded by your time and effort. So, please, give generously. ;-)