[ITK-users] Migration to GitHub

[Bill Lorensen]

Here are comments I made 3 years ago on the VTK discussion about
changing VTK's code review process.
-------------

Berk,

I think we need to reach out to potential developers. Especially those
outside of Kitware(and their paying customers) and the long term VTK
developers outside Kitware. Those communities can adapt to anything.
We need to focus on is how can we can attract new developers. In the
past, new processes were adopted and adapted by Kitware, their
customers and hard core VTK developers with very little input from the
broader community of potential developers.

ITK is going through the same issues but addressing the issues not
through process change. They are looking at outreach and better
documentation of the current process. Matt McCormick at Kitware has
been leading this effort.

I think there are lots of non-process improvements possible. But I
don't have a silver bullet for attracting new developers. Perhaps VTK
is too old school for today's developers. Stuck with an old
architecture, old graphics architecture, old and complex languages. I
honestly don't know what the root causes are. If we only include the
old-timers in theses discussion then we will not attract a younger set
of devleopers.

Bill
---------------

On Mon, Jul 31, 2017 at 5:07 PM, Matt McCormick
<matt.mccormick at kitware.com> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> We are considering migration of ITK's software process to GitHub, and
> we would like your feedback.
>
> As an open-source, community-driven project, mechanisms to communicate
> and interact with the community are a high priority for ITK.
> Contributing should be as easy as possible. Increasingly over the past
> many years, GitHub has become the de facto place to interact for open
> source development. It is now a hub for:
>
>   Microsoft
>   Facebook
>   Google
>   The Scientific Python Community
>   The 3D Slicer Community
>
> Our InsightSoftwareConsortium GitHub organization [1] already has 67
> people in it and 74 repositories. There are hundreds of projects that
> depend on ITK on GitHub. Many ITK developers are familiar with the
> development process on GitHub (i.e the pull request process) and
> already have an account on this platform. There are also advantages to
> linking issues and commits with other projects and repositories. Since
> ITK thrives on the open-source development idea, everyone who wants to
> help the project should be able to contribute, and therefore it should
> be as easy as possible to start participating in the community.
>
> Recently, GitHub's code review capabilities have greatly improved,
> which make it more feasible to coordinate contributions for a large
> project like ITK. And, there are many existing GitHub-integrated
> services that we can leverage.
>
> Thanks to resources from the National Library of Medicine and
> technological advances, it is now feasible to migrate the project's
> software process to GitHub. There are many infrastructural aspects to
> the migration, and it would take multiple months to complete. Please
> let us know your thoughts before we embark on the journey.
>
>
> [1] https://github.com/InsightSoftwareConsortium
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