Supporting Users in Open Source

What are the social expectations of open source developers to help users understand their projects? What are the social expectations of users when asking for help?

As part of developing Dask, an open source library with growing adoption, I directly interact with users over GitHub issues for bug reports, StackOverflow for usage questions, a mailing list and live Gitter chat for community conversation. Dask is blessed with awesome users. These are researchers doing very cool work of high impact and with novel use cases. They report bugs and usage questions with such skill that it’s clear that they are Veteran Users of open source projects.

Veteran Users are Heroes

It’s not easy being a veteran user. It takes a lot of time to distill a bug down to a reproducible example, or a question into an MCVE, or to read all of the documentation to make sure that a conceptual question definitely isn’t answered in the docs. And yet this effort really shines through and it’s incredibly valuable to making open source software better. These distilled reports are arguably more important than fixing the actual bug or writing the actual documentation.

Bugs occur in the wild, in code that is half related to the developer’s library (like Pandas or Dask) and half related to the user’s application. The veteran user works hard to pull away all of their code and data, creating a gem of an example that is trivial to understand and run anywhere that still shows off the problem.

This way the veteran user can show up with their problem to the development team and say “here is something that you will quickly understand to be a problem.” On the developer side this is incredibly valuable. They learn of a relevant bug and immediately understand what’s going on, without having to download someone else’s data or understand their domain. This switches from merely convenient to strictly necessary when the developers deal with 10+ such reports a day.

Novice Users need help too

However there are a lot of novice users out there. We have all been novice users once, and even if we are veterans today we are probably still novices at something else. Knowing what to do and how to ask for help is hard. Having the guts to walk into a chat room where people will quickly see that you’re a novice is even harder. It’s like using public transit in a deeply foreign language. Respect is warranted here.

I categorize novice users into two groups:

Experienced technical novices, who are very experienced in their field and technical things generally, but who don’t yet have a thorough understanding of open source culture and how to ask questions smoothly. They’re entirely capable of behaving like a veteran user if pointed in the right directions.
Novice technical novices, who don’t yet have the ability to distill their problems into the digestible nuggets that open source developers expect.

In the first case of technically experienced novices, I’ve found that being direct works surprisingly well. I used to be apologetic in asking people to submit MCVEs. Today I’m more blunt but surprisingly I find that this group doesn’t seem to mind. I suspect that this group is accustomed to operating in situations where other people’s time is very costly.

The second case of novice novice users are more challenging for individual developers to handle one-by-one, both because novices are more common, and because solving their problems often requires more time commitment. Instead open source communities often depend on broadcast and crowd-sourced solutions, like documentation, StackOverflow, or meetups and user groups. For example in Dask we strongly point people towards StackOverflow in order to build up a knowledge-base of question-answer pairs. Pandas has done this well; almost every Pandas question you Google leads to a StackOverflow post, handling 90% of the traffic and improving the lives of thousands. Many projects simply don’t have the human capital to hand-hold individuals through using the library.

In a few projects there are enough generous and experienced users that they’re able to field questions from individual users. SymPy is a good example here. I learned open source programming within SymPy. Their community was broad enough that they were able to hold my hand as I learned Git, testing, communication practices and all of the other soft skills that we need to be effective in writing great software. The support structure of SymPy is something that I’ve never experienced anywhere else.

My Apologies

I’ve found myself becoming increasingly impolite when people ask me for certain kinds of extended help with their code. I’ve been trying to track down why this is and I think that it comes from a mismatch of social contracts.

Large parts of technical society have an (entirely reasonable) belief that open source developers are available to answer questions about how we use their project. This was probably true in popular culture, where our stereotypical image of an open source developer was working out of their basement long into the night on things that relatively few enthusiasts bothered with. They were happy to engage and had the free time in which to do it.

In some ways things have changed a lot. We now have paid professionals building software that is used by thousands or millions of users. These professionals easily charge consulting fees of hundreds of dollars per hour for exactly the kind of assistance that people show up expecting for free under the previous model. These developers have to answer for how they spend their time when they’re at work, and when they’re not at work they now have families and kids that deserve just as much attention as their open source users.

Both of these cultures, the creative do-it-yourself basement culture and the more corporate culture, are important to the wonderful surge we’ve seen in open source software. How do we balance them? Should developers, like doctors or lawyers perform pro-bono work as part of their profession? Should grants specifically include paid time for community engagement and outreach? Should users, as part of receiving help feel an obligation to improve documentation or stick around and help others?

Solutions?

I’m not sure what to do here. I feel an obligation to remain connected with users from a broad set of applications, even those that companies or grants haven’t decided to fund. However at the same time I don’t know how to say “I’m sorry, I simply don’t have the time to help you with your problem.” in a way that feels at all compassionate.

I think that people should still ask questions. I think that we need to foster an environment in which developers can say “Sorry. Busy.” more easily. I think that we as a community need better resources to teach novice users to become veteran users.

One positive approach is to honor veteran users, and through this public praise to encourage other users to “up their game”, much as developers do today with coding skills. There are thousands of blogposts about how to develop code well, and people strive tirelessly to improve themselves. My hope is that by attaching the language of skill, like the term “veteran”, to user behaviors we can create an environment where people are proud of how cleanly they can raise issues and how clearly they can describe questions for documentation. Doing this well is critical for a project’s success and requires substantial effort and personal investment.