Minimum Lovable Project

_posts/2019-04-24-minimum-requirements.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Minimum requirements to participate in a project
+tags:
+- opinion
+- opensource
+- jenkins
+---
+
+When waiting for containers to build, or dependencies to download, my mind
+tends to wander. Yesterday it wandered to the plight of new contributors to
+modern free and open source projects; how much they must do before even
+attempting to collaborate! I started a [Twitter
+poll](https://twitter.com/agentdero/status/1120713097986002944), asking: 
+
+> *In order to participate in my open source project, you must have at
+> minimum:*
+>
+> * *GitHub account*
+> * *Google account*
+> * *Slack account*
+> * *signed CLA faxed to legal*
+
+The results were overwhelmingly in favor of requiring, at minimum, a
+[GitHub](https://github.com) account. This was the result I expected and
+certainly matches the anecdotal experiences I have had in recent years.
+
+Unfortunately Twitter polls doesn't allow multiple selections, as the reality
+for most people is that they need _all_ of those, as [Felix
+Frank](https://twitter.com/felis_rex/status/1120735653422075910) alluded to in
+his response. When I think of the [Jenkins](https://jenkins.io) project in
+particular, the "registration" process for new contributors might typically
+include:
+
+* A GitHub account.
+* An LDAP account to access Jira, Confluence, and Jenkins-on-Jenkins.
+* Connecting to IRC over Freenode, or a [Gitter](https://gitter.im) channel,
+  depending on their focus area.
+* Subscription to a mailing list operated by Google Groups.
+* A Google account, if they want to participate in Hangouts or comment on
+  Google Docs for various design documents.
+
+As we have discussed newer services to incorporate into the community, I have
+grown weary over the number of logins we would expect each contributor to
+maintain.
+
+I do not find myself reminiscing about the "good old days" of open source
+software, when things were more oriented around Bugzilla, CVS/Subversion, mailing
+lists, and IRC. There too we had account sprawl, it was perhaps a bit more
+non-obvious.
+
+For the Jenkins project, the ideal world would mean that everything linked to
+our project's LDAP infrastructure. With services like GitHub, That is obviously
+not possible, so the next best thing would be to use GitHub as the source of
+identity for all our other development services. Yes this couples us more
+closely with GitHub, but at least then we would stop pretending we're not
+already intricately bound with GitHub as a service.
+
+
+As many projects approach the summer, and Google Summer of Code kicks off, I
+encourage you to consider the number of accounts, repositories, groups, and
+other information a student or new-contributor must have in order to _start_
+adding to the community.
+
+Our goal as stewards of such projects, should be to push that number towards
+zero.