[swift-users] Remove some unecessary contribution friction

[drkibitz]

After spending some time getting some up to try to get involved with the
swift dev community, I thought my experience would merit this message.

First of all, I understand that open sourcing a project as large as this at
a large company is a balancing act between the usage of the common access
points that the open source community uses often, and the closed tools the
company provides. There are certain tools and processes that make more
sense than others to keep full control, and I have a few issues regarding
this.

My big issue here, are these mailing lists. There are already so much
processes around contribution, it's too difficult to just get in touch with
someone over an official channel. The only option I found were these
mailing lists. Is Mailman the best solution here, or is the idea that these
list are at least something, while the core team continues to investigate
potentially better solutions? There are so many better tools available
these days, and I would very much recommend to usage of any one of them
that removes friction... Gitter or Slack to name a couple.

Secondly, I think having a bug tracking system while all of the code is
already on GitHub is kind of moot, or at least confusing. What is the
separation between GitHub issues, pull requests, and Jira? Is Jira really
being used as a bug tracking system, or more of a project management tool?
I would recommend just using, or at least pushing the GitHub features over
what Jira provides. This is coming from someone that has been fighting with
back and forth Jira and GitHub Enterprise usage over the past 5+ years. If
Jira provides something internally that GitHub doesn't, then use it, but do
not force it on the community, it's confusing.

Third but not least, I know for a fact that Jenkins has GitHub OAuth
capability, and I would be curious if Jira, and maybe even Mailman has
something similar. If a contributor could sign in to all of these 3+
systems with their GitHub account, that would make a high impact in the
amount of people that touch this community.

Thanks,
-d
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