DOC: Update contributing notes

[Peque]

This could be added to the development-guidelines.rst in the documentation instead (or apart from).

I think it is important to be clear in this respect to avoid frustration and to avoid wasting your time or anybody's time.

Examples of:

• Ignored PRs for years or months: ENH: Bump required SciPy version to 0.18.1 #1976, Improve start/end utilization in TradingCalendar #1804, DOC: Fix incorrect package name #2510, Python 3.6 support #2512
• Closed PR implementing the same solution on your own: BLD: Avoid installing futures with Python 3 #2511

Those are just based on my experience, but I am guessing I am not being treated differently and this may apply to anybody contributing to the project.

Also, it seems clear from the Git logs that you are not really integrating much contributions from the community:

git log --merges --pretty=format:"%h %<(15)%ar %s"

In the last year in particular, it seems all merged changes were from Quantopian and none from external/community contributions.

[Peque]

Just to be clear, this is not an attempt to troll anybody.

I do appreciate the fact that you share this project with the community and understand how hard it may be to handle community contributions when your project becomes popular. ❤️

[coveralls]

Coverage decreased (-0.2%) to 87.357% when pulling e53bdae on Peque:readme into f0e34f8 on quantopian:master.

[coveralls]

Coverage remained the same at 88.195% when pulling 3c7393c on Peque:readme into d451f0e on quantopian:master.

[quantophred]

Hey @Peque, thanks so much for your thoughtful PR and comments!

As it looks like you've guessed, we've been pretty heads-down on our internal roadmap for a while now, and haven't had a lot of spare cycles to devote to communication with the community on GitHub. (Our community team is more active on our forums, but GitHub tends to be the realm of our engineers, who tend to be pretty shy and focused on our own internal goals.)

I totally agree: we should improve our communication with our GitHub community, and especially help to manage contributors' expectations. Ironically, I don't think anyone on our team actually saw this PR until I opened it just now; but I'll bring it up with the team and see what we can do. (In the spirit of improved communication: I can't promise any specific timeline for an official response, because we're a small team with a lot of work to manage; but I think your point is an important one, and I will personally carve out whatever time I can to work on it.)

In the meantime, if you're really raring to help give this community the attention it deserves, we are hiring for software engineers :) https://www.quantopian.com/about#careers

[quantophred]

Hey again! Just wanted to let you know that, in part based on your feedback, we are currently kicking off our first dedicated Quantopian open source focus day: we've gathered some engineers together in a conference room in order to spend the day triaging issues and PRs, and come up with a better approach to engaging with the open source community across all our projects.

Stay tuned for more updates, and happy new year!

[Peque]

@quantophred Good to hear that. Happy New Year! 😊

[richafrank]

Thanks @Peque . We definitely appreciate you looking to prevent further frustration or wasted time for everyone! We are an even smaller team now, so this is all the more warranted.