Reflections

How can I help you get started? 🤔

A trick for staying positive when responding to questions that should not have been asked in the first place.

Alya Abbott • 4 min read

A year ago, I figured out a better way to manage new contributors who are failing to follow the guidelines for the Zulip open-source community, and enjoy it more.

Zulip is an open-source team chat application designed for seamless remote and hybrid work, with conversations organized by topic. It has a vibrant contributor community, and new folks join all the time, especially in the months leading up to applications for the Google Summer of Code and Outreachy mentorship programs.

Our team is committed to helping bring up the next generation of open-source contributors from a wide range of backgrounds. We’ve written over 150K words of documentation on how to contribute to Zulip, with topics ranging from practical Git tips to essays on important architectural decisions, and detailed guidelines for new contributors.

We also encourage contributors to drop by the Zulip development community chat to ask questions and discuss their work. Our community guidelines explain how to get help, with detailed notes on which channels to use for what:

“Ask questions on channels rather than DMing core contributors. You’ll get answers faster since other people can help, and it makes it possible for others to benefit from the discussion.”

Nevertheless, every few days, I get DMs like these from new contributors 🤦‍♀️ :

So… what’s the question?

OK, did you read the guide on how to start?

I really have no idea how to fix your Git issue.

I used to get super irritated every time this happened. If you’d actually bothered to read the documentation we spent so much effort crafting, you’d:

  1. Most likely solve your own problem by finding the answer in the documentation.
  2. Send a message in public channel like we asked.

I would do my best to send a friendly response, but to my embarrassment, the irritation would leak through.

It wasn’t a big waste of time, but I’d still be grumpy 15 minutes later. I might even get distracted thinking about it later in the day. It felt ridiculous to dwell on it, but there it was.

Finally, I realized that I could actually do something about the situation. I couldn’t compel all new contributors to read and follow Zulip’s guidelines, and not to waste my time. Ignoring these messages wouldn’t feel right to me either. But I could change how I responded to them.

One year ago, I decided to start playing question tennis.

Rosencrantz: We could play at questions.

Guildenstern: What good would that do?

— “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”, by Tom Stoppard

Are you familiar with question tennis? Have you ever tried having a conversation by asking a series of questions (no statements)? Maybe I could help new contributors just by asking good questions? Perhaps all they needed was a rubber duck?

My new goal was to respond only with questions, while at the same time being more kind and helpful than I had been previously. The very first conversation where I tried this went like this. (At the time, I allowed myself to make statements, but only vacuous ones.)

This was amazing! I didn’t have to grump at the contributor to go read our documentation and ask questions in public channels if they couldn’t figure it out! They just did it!

My new goal was to respond only with questions, while at the same time being more kind and helpful than I had been previously.

Over the past year, my new strategy has had more benefits than I ever expected:

  1. These conversations no longer spoil my mood. Instead of being an irritation, DMs like these are an opportunity to play a game.
  2. As a result, my tone is more positive, so I’m pretty sure the contributor experience is better too.
  3. I’m approaching new contributor confusion with more curiosity. Why did this person decide to message me? Was it legitimately hard to figure out what to do in their situation? For example, I recently realized that we didn’t have a consolidated reference on how to get help while working on an issue, so I fixed it.
  4. The constraint of having to reply with a question can actually make it easier to respond quickly by limiting the options.
  5. For (often vague) questions from someone who isn’t genuinely invested in learning, replying with a quick clarification question works better than engaging more deeply.

Recently, I’ve been playing with asking questions when I feel annoyed in other parts of my life. A mental “Why the heck did they do that?” can often be voiced as a genuine “How did you decide do that?” Laughing together about how someone got confused is a whole lot more pleasant than being mad at them about it.