Re: how to bring in new people [was: forwarded message from Satish Athreya]

On Thu, 17 Apr 2003, Alexander Kellett wrote:

>> Keith Whitwell writes:
>> > Unfortunately in my experience, emails like this usually end at
>> > about this point.  You can reply or not, but whatever effort goes
>> > into it is usually wasted [...] chances are that's the last you'll
>> > hear of them.
><snip>
>> But one shouldn't care.  One should, and even must, optimize
>> for the case where it *wouldn't* be wasted ... if one welcomed
>> everyone, arms open, instead of "only sometimes", and always
>> arms-folded.
>
>the people that will end up contributing will commonly have
>had the sense to email the component maintainer with a patch 
>or as a last resort, the mailing list with a url. the guys 
>that turn up saying "i'm here to help", well, usually don't.
>of course, xfree86 doesn't appear that nice place for even
>past contributors, but, that sort of stuff will hopefully be
>changing in the near future.

The problem I see with someone saying "I'd like to help, but I 
don't know what to help with or where to start", is that IMHO, 
the person hasn't really tried to _find_ something to help on.  
We can all make tonnes of suggestions to them, but spending a 
tonne of time doing so, as Keith points out is often a waste of 
time.  By posting a few web pages of potential hack projects or 
cleanups on the web, we can just point potential would-be 
contributers to that, and await their questions about specific 
things they've elected to work on.

Code gets written because:

1) Someone has a personal interest in hacking on a particular 
thing, and they're personally motivated to do so

or

2) Someone is payed to hack on something, and they do it because 
they desire money.  They may or may not also be interested 
personally in the particular thing.

The category of people we're discussing here don't fit into 
category 2, but rather they "potentially" fit into category 1.  
As such, it is basically up to *them* to determine what - if 
anything is something that they personally would desire to hack 
on for whatever their motivation.  That is best done if they find 
something that is broken that they'd personally like to fix, and 
just start working on it, or find something missing that they'd 
like to add and just start working on it.

We can make suggestions, but if none of our suggestions appeal to 
someone, they probably wont do anything.  And the easiest way for 
them to find something they are interested in, is by fidning 
things in the code/documentation that bothers them and fixing it.

This can be summarized by:  Open source developers not being
payed, are universally driven by some type of personal interest.  
It is up to each individual developer, to determine where or what 
their own personal interest is.


-- 
Mike A. Harris