Some anonymous feedback (sent with love):
<quote>
It's important that we understand the reason for trying to get new
people involved with the project. The way to really grow the project's
adoption is by increasing user interest in the product and its relevance
in the community. Adding new people to the project isn't a direct
solution to that problem. Right now, I'd say that the project lacks
both, but this isn't really abnormal for what is a niche product.
<quote>
Josh Elser wrote:
I meant to send this out closer to the new year (to ride on the new year
resolution stereotype), but I slacked. Forgive me.
As should be aware by those paying attention, we have had very little
growth within the project over the past 6-9 months. We've had our normal
spattering of contributions, a few from some repeat people, but I don't
think we've grown as much as we could.
I wanted to see if anyone has any suggestions on what we could try to do
better in the coming year to help more people get involved with the
project. I don't want this to turn into a "we do X wrong" discussion, so
please try to stay positive and include suggestion(s) for every problem
presented when possible.
Also, everyone should feel welcome to participate in the discussion
here. If you fall into the "bucket" described, I'd love to hear from
you. If anyone doesn't want to publicly respond, please feel free to
email me privately and I'll anonymously post to the list on your behalf.
Some ideas to start off discussion:
* Help reduce barrier to entry for new developers
- Ensure imple/easy-to-process instructions for getting and building
code in common environments
- Instructions on running tests and reporting issues
* More high-level examples
- Maybe we start too deep in distributed-systems land and we scare away
devs who think they "don't know enough to help"
- Recording "newbie" tickets and providing adequate information for
anyone to come along and try to take it on
- Encourage/help/promote "concrete" ideas/code in the project. Something
that is more tangible for devs to wrap their head around (also can help
with adoption from new users)
* Better documentation and "marketing"
- We do "ok" with the occasional blog post, and the user manual is
usually thorough, but we can obviously do better.
- Can we create more "literature" to encourage more users and devs to
get involved, trying to lower the barrier to entry?
Thanks all.
