In August 2018 the Open Source and Standards Group completed their first Pulp Community Health Audit. This annual audit is a chance to assess the health and diversity of the Pulp community, identify growth areas, apply best practices, and check-in on progress made towards previous goals.

This blog gives a summary, but you can read the full report here.

Overview

Overall the Pulp community is healthy, but it can improve by making more of its resources more clearly discoverable, e.g. quick start guides, etc. Here are the recommended actions from the audit for how the Pulp community can improve:

  • Create a quick start documentation guide
  • Create a more visible link to the PUPs
  • Create an online calendar as a steady-state place for community members to discover events
  • Create a direct link to release notes on the Pulp web site
  • Review PUPs to see if a Tech Advisory Board or other adjustments need to be made to the governance model
  • Explore if Pulp would benefit from a part-time or full-time outreach and marketing person

Infrastructure and Process

Recommendations to Pulp come in two areas here: Resource Discoverability and Process Improvements.

Pulp needs to focus on its website and docs to ensure users can find what they need quickly. Some suggested improvements include more quickstart guides and fewer page clicks for users to get to key pages such as the installation page.

For the process improvements, the PUP governence model needs to be further refined, along with more thought put into the governence model for the Pulp community.

Release Management

Pulp is following the known best-practices in this area.

Activity

There isn’t data available on the commit history or contributor activity or engagement in the report. In terms of community events, Pulp has no public calendar showing all of the events a user or contributor could get involved with.

Documentation

Pulp needs to become easier to install, and as it does its documentation will get shorter. Pulp also needs better organized documentation, along with quick-start assets. In some cases the documentation is available, but not discoverable, e.g. the release notes are hard to find.

Code Quality

Pulp will re-assess its code-quality metrics with Pulp3 which has significantly different code line count for its feature set relative to Pulp2.

Outreach

Outreach such as blog, social media, and conference activity is one area Pulp can do much more. For the blog, Pulp needs to have more activity on a more consistent basis to increase its engagement with users. Similarly for social media, we want to have more engagement there. Additionally Pulp needs to increase its visibility at user-facing conferences.

License

Pulp maybe should consider a Contributor License Agreement, but the last time open source lawyers advised us not having a CLA was ok.

Get involved

If you have questions, feedback, or want to get involved somehow, please reach out to the Community Co-Leads, Brian Bouterse bbouters@redhat.com or Ina Panova ipanova@redhat.com.