Re: Meeting Minutes : Amanda Open Source Community

Hi!  I hacked on Amanda for a while before joining Mozilla 8 years ago
(today!).

While I was at Zmanda I worked pretty hard to keep the project accessible
to non-employees.  While we did have a solid core of helpful power-users,
substantial code-related participation was rare at best.  I think there
were a variety of reasons for that, and some of the work we did aimed to
change it (rewriting from C to Perl, and specifically the Application
API).  But at least in my time it never really took off.

I also see that Amanda itself has not seen a lot of work recently -- the
most recent commit is in February.

I would suggest a few things:
 * Focus on the strengths -- perhaps form some kind of advisory council
comprised of long-time community members that can give guidance on project
direction.  I know that's a little scary for a company, but "advisory" is a
little softer than "governance".  That group could probably advise on the
remainder of my suggestions.
 * Put the code on Github.  Maybe it feels like selling out, but that's a
massively lower bar to entry than sourceforge / svn.  Buildbot did this
about 10 years ago and the bump in participation was massive.
 * Set up some kind of public CI -- maybe Travis is enough, or maybe set up
Buildbot (or Taskcluster.. I feel obligated to say that..)
 * Actively groom casual contributors:
   * Set up "good first bug" tagged issues -- tasks with small scope that
can be accomplished by a newcomer in a day or two
   * Participate in programs like GSoC, Outreachy, GCI, or host hackathons
at relevant conferences
   * Provide a simple, well-tested getting-started-hacking guide

Somewhat longer-term, it might be good to talk about what Amanda wants to
be.  Amanda's *old* - 26 years old!  What is its specialty in the modern,
cloud-driven era?  With limited development resources, it doesn't make
sense to pretend Amanda is good for things where it is a bad fit.

Dustin