+1 to code sprints (aka. hackathons) and what Andrew is saying
here.
Face to face events, and especially code sprints are a great way
to make human connections and build trust in the community. It is
so easy to overlook how crucial this is for newcomers. Bringing
them into the community is battling against a very easy choice to
simply walk away.
Tools and process have to be "just right" to balance properly. But
you can have amazing tools and if people just aren't inspired, or
if people inadvertently get turned off by lack of engagement even
awesome tools won't fix that. A buffer of trust built by face to
face contact can help a lot to forgive inevitable
misunderstandings, delays, PITA's, and other issues that crop up.
On 13/07/13 18:06, Andrew Eisenberg wrote:
I'm not saying this is THE answer or anything, but it
may be a small step towards getting more contributors
and outside participation.
We've been holding hackathons instead of demo camps for
the past couple of years and they've been well attended
(20-30 people) and at the end of the evening we have had
4-5 patches that are good enough that with a little polish
can be contributed to the code base. Granted, we haven't
had any long term contributors or committers come out of
this, but at least it is introducing newcomers to open
source and the Eclipse community. I've generally found
the experience more rewarding that the demo camps.
It's still a bunch of work for the project leads: making
sure the getting started docs are up to date, and
finding/creating a bunch of bugs suitable for newcomers,
etc. But this is something that is a lot of work up front
and then it pays off over the long run.
This is not a way to get people to fix the hard bugs, and it's
not really a way to save work for project members (since any
bug that a newcomer can fix in an evening is something that a
project member can fix in a couple of hours). What this
really does is bring life into the community and make it seem
like Eclipse is not "dead". And maybe over time, if enough
hackathons are held, this is a way to slowly turn people into
committers.
regards,
Andrew
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