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Clarify and make more prominent the role of the RubyGems partnership #5
Description
One specific issue I've heard echoed from the community is the importance of making it clear what the funding situation is for RubyGems hosting.
To test public perception, I ran a Twitter poll on this a few days ago, and the results are shown in the screenshot below:
It's not surprising that half of people don't know offhand who is responsible for paying for hosting, although it'd be great if that number was lower. It is somewhat concerning that of the remaining people who responded, ~3 out of 10 assume RubyTogether is responsible for hosting fees.
Looking around and trying to find the information as a casual visitor might, I was able to find the RubyGems partnership page, which is linked from the "What about Ruby Central" section down in the RubyTogether's FAQ.
This is useful, and a good start!
https://rubytogether.org/rubygems
I am not sure if the language there has been reviewed by Ruby Central. If so, great! If not, I'd like to suggest having them do so and then making sure to coordinate whenever this page is updated.
But when we go to Rubygems.org itself (which is where most people will end up when just using Ruby rather than specifically looking up RubyTogether), we see this:
As a visitor, seeing no mention of Ruby Central here, nor the RubyGems partnership, I could totally understand why people would assume RubyTogether was the primary steward who was responsible for covering hosting fees.
Ruby Central is listed on the sponsors page, but not in this attribution.
I'd like to suggest rewriting this copy on RubyGems.org to make it clear that RubyGems is supported via the Rubygems Partnership, and then explicitly linking to that page. You can have an additional paragraph about contributing to RubyTogether, since Ruby Central isn't really actively soliciting donations, but it should be made super clear that these two things are overlapping but not equivalent to one another.
It might be even more helpful to make the partnership page a whole lot more detailed, explaining the whole end-to-end story about who is paying for what.
(Note: I'm speaking only for myself based on what I've seen expressed as a concern, I'm not affiliated w. Ruby Central. But I do think just from the perspective of the Ruby community member, they need to know who is responsible for paying the bills for the things they rely on day-to-day)
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adarsh commentedon Apr 27, 2018
This is great - thank you for raising this and adding such detail. 👍
I'm listing the places where, once we agree on some new copy, we should make pull requests:
rubygems.org site
rubytogether.org site
shushugah commentedon Apr 27, 2018
Ruby Gems published one blog about its relation to Ruby Together and Ruby Central
https://blog.rubygems.org/2017/03/15/rubygems-funding.html
practicingdev commentedon Apr 27, 2018
@adarsh Those look like great places to start! Thanks for looking into this.
qrush commentedon Apr 27, 2018
Copying this from the RubyTogether slack. I feel there's 4 places that should have this situation spelled out:
adarsh commentedon Apr 27, 2018
How about this for a draft?
Who are the right people to edit/update this copy? /cc @qrush @indirect @evanphx @ezkl
danielcompton commentedon Apr 29, 2018
What about this for the second paragraph? This makes it really clear what the money from each party is going towards, and also highlights Fastly's extremely generous support (I had no idea how much that was until I did the math). I did those calcs at a blended bandwidth rate of $0.10/GB. Not sure what your traffic breakdown is, but I think this would be roughly the ballpark figures?
evanphx commentedon Apr 29, 2018
I am not in favor of putting dollar values on these. They are fairly volitile, with the RT share being the most so as it’s been $0 some months as it’s need based only.
I’d much rather just be explicit about what each group provides. Additionally, RT does not solely provide administration of RG.O as I also do that work.
evanphx commentedon Apr 29, 2018
What is the “RubyGems Partnership”? I’ve never heard of this as an explicit thing and frankly I’d be the one that would be a partner.
evanphx commentedon Apr 29, 2018
The reason Ruby Central is not mentioned at the bottom of RubyGems.org is that that space was, for a long time, just companies that donated services to RubyGems.org. Ruby Central wasn't (and isn't) one of those companies, ergo no mention.
It should be noted the Ruby Central managers RubyGems.org as a community resource on the communities behalf, paid for by community members through our conferences. Ruby Central hasn't felt the need to advertise about RubyGems.org in the past (as the poll will show) because there simply was no need or reason to call it out. This was true for RubyForge, the precursor to RubyGems.org, and has been true of RubyGems.org since @qrush donated it.
practicingdev commentedon Apr 29, 2018
Honestly I am surprised to hear that the RubyGems partnership thing wasn't an official and explicit thing because I went through way more work than I would expect the average would-be RubyTogether donor would to find it and it sure sounded like a legit agreement between the two orgs.
But no matter how that's sorted out, I think the main transparency issue that matters is that when people sign up for a RubyTogether membership, they ought to know what their money is and is not funding.
Add a paragraph about the RubyGems partnership
adarsh commentedon Apr 30, 2018
Thanks @evanphx for the clarification and others for helpful discussion. I've taken this discussion and opened a PR (#8) with some proposed copy. I'd appreciate some feedback on the language here to ensure alignment, which we can use wherever. Certainly, if there is a better/different way to help clarify how RG is supported for the Ruby public, I'm all for advancing that.
pixeltrix commentedon Apr 30, 2018
@evanphx I'm confused by your statement that you don't know what The Rubygems Partnership is since the announcement at https://rubytogether.org/news/2015-03-19-announcing-the-rubygems-partnership seems to be pretty clear there's two parties to an agreement, e.g.
Was that instead a unilateral announcement by RT?
evanphx commentedon Apr 30, 2018
@pixeltrix This is just that my memory isn't as good as I'd like. I went back to find where we had discussed a partnership and did find it, it had just slipped my memory. It was formulated in a slack chat between myself and Andre mostly and I had just entirely forgotten. This was back in 2015 when most of the questions being asked now were not being asked. We agreed on the language on that page.
In hindsight, a few things:
We are all well on our way to figuring out the next evolution of those statements to help make it clear to the community how things are paid for and managed.
Add a paragraph about the RubyGems partnership
Add a paragraph about the RubyGems partnership
Update Support Section