[Discussion][Solved] Be more friendly to your community

[fredpi]

I'm opening this issue as I'm quite disappointed how some community suggestions are treated by the project maintainers.

I want to start by saying that I understand the complexity involved in the setup and management of such an important project, especially if it is open source and everyone can create issues or pull requests. I don't expect everything to go without issues and I don't blame anyone for not instantaneously reacting to every comment from the community.

This is why I didn't complain once that a PR of mine has been left ignored for more than 2 weeks, even though a comment promised a review within a few hours. The only thing I did was to kindly inform about continuous rebases I did, adapting the PR to the state of the project. I also didn't complain, when without any explanation, the PR was put on hold alongside multiple other PR's from the community with trivial but much needed changes that could have been reviewed and merged within minutes or even seconds (#516, #518, #527, #531, #534).

Today, without further notice, my PR has been closed and for me, this just shows a tremendous lack of respect for the community. I don't think there's much more to say about this, this is just unacceptable behavior. To be clear: I have no problem with my changes being dismissed, but getting approved for setting up the PR, then getting the promise for a same-day-review, then getting ignored, put on hold and closed without further notice, is more than frustrating.

I understand that the maintainers' time is valuable, but so is mine. As long as you don't have the time to interact with the community at least a tiny bit, please document it instead of claiming:

Contribution and feedback are encouraged and always welcome.

Sadly, this isn't the only example of disappointing community interaction. The whole localization topic displays similar issues:

1. Dismissing community proposal
2. Promising something (localizations available just after launch)
3. Neither delivering nor providing sufficient updates on the promised progress

[corneliusroemer]

@fredpi This may be better placed in the documentation repo as it affects the entire project, not just ios - much fewer people watch the ios repo than documentation.
Friendly recommendation, you may want to tone down your issue's headline or you risk getting a warning for code of conduct violation like (false statements/insinuations/polemical language). Not saying I would agree with that interpretation but you may not want to offer an attack surface for a ban.
Confer corona-warn-app/cwa-documentation#99 corona-warn-app/cwa-documentation#100 corona-warn-app/cwa-documentation#101 corona-warn-app/cwa-documentation#160 and corona-warn-app/cwa-app-android#600 corona-warn-app/cwa-app-android#478

[fredpi]

@corneliusroemer Thanks for the suggestion 👍

Somehow makes sense, but as I'm specifically addressing issues with the community interaction in the iOS project, I think it also makes sense to leave it here: I don't know how community proposals are treated in different sub projects, so making broad statements in the documentation repo wouldn't be fair.

[tkowark]

Thank your for the feedback @fredpi . The (new) issue title is completely fine and we apologize for the extra work that was caused by not transparently communicating changes in handling your PR. We'll discuss with the team how to best avoid such situations in the future.

I'll keep this issue open until we provide further clarification, i.e., as an adoption of the Readme, issue/PR templates, etc.

[fredpi]

@tkowark Thank you!

[tkowark]

Regarding your PR: The closing without notice was unintentional and happened due to changes of branch names, which accidentally closed all PRs with a certain base branch (e.g., #534). As your PR was open for a longer period of time, @inf2381 did not notice that it was also closed. The team will decide how to further proceed with the PR.

Regarding the topic of this issue, we created a new PR #732 that clarifies the contribution model to the repository. We think that honesty and friendliness go hand in hand. Thus, while the new contribution guidelines are of a course a bit more strict than before, we only want to avoid disappointment in the community that comes naturally when work is done without being rewarded by becoming part of the app. We hope that these changes help to avoid future disappointment and - in hindsight - should have made some of these points clearer a bit earlier.