Thanks Jeremy, those are good points!
Any suggestions on how/where to best emphasize this?
Blogs/social-media/mailing lists? Something more?
Jeremy Kepner wrote:
A few additional comments:
(1) How can attract good contributors. 1-2 "ace" contributors can really carry
an open-source project on their back.
- Perhaps emphasize Accumulo's world class capabilites: performance,
scalability, security.
(2) How can we attact good users with money. Good users will be able to use the
software
well and get good results. If they have money they will be able to support the
community.
- Perhaps emphasize that Accumulo is suitable for the largest workloads at the
largest institutions.
On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 09:51:33PM -0500, Josh Elser wrote:
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.
