Hi folks, We've not elected anybody to the committership since we started incubation, as far as I can tell. Learning how to do this is a really important part of incubation, so why don't we kick start the effort now? :)
There are multiple parts to this: 1. Making the project attractive to potential contributors 2. Making it easy to start contributing 3. Recognising merit in people who do contribute 4. The formality of electing those people to the committership Now, we've been working on (1) since we started incubating. It's the rest we need to pay attention to now. But briefly, here are some ideas: - Have a nice website that clearly explains what the project does - Have friendly, active mailing lists where people's questions are answered - Put out regular releases and share the news of this around the web - Start a project blog, or something similar, and communicate project news - Set up a Twitter account, etc, and talk about the project a lot in other places This is, essentially, marketing activity. Which I know a lot of folks have an allergic reaction to. But it's essential to getting the word out. Which is your first step if you want to convert people into contributors. :) Okay, for step (2), there are lots things to do: - Add a "starter" tag to your JIRA tickets, which means "this is ideal for people who are just starting out with the code base". Document this tag on the project homepage, and make it abundantly clear that contribution is welcome! - Add "easy", "medium", and "hard" tags. These serve a similar function. - Get the GitHub integration set up and functioning as a first class contribution method. Document this on the website. Make the top level files in our repository "GitHub friendly" (i.e. they display nicely on GitHub) - Add documentation. Lots of it. Start with a CONTRIBUTING.md file at the root of the repository, and make it very very easy to get started - Consider having weekly or monthly Google Hangouts, or webcasts, or write blog posts about specific modules or parts of the code - Keep a keen eye out for anyone on the lists who looks like they *might* be interested in contributing and gently prod them in the right direction. Be friendly, encouraging, and thankful Step (3) is starting to get more process oriented, but basically: - Look at people opening tickets, creating pull requests, answering questions on the mailing lists, submitting patches, etc. Set up some sort of weekly or monthly reminder for yourself or the whole PMC to do this - Remind yourself that code is not the only way to contribute. We're interested in attracting any sort of help. Be that with code, documentation, project organisation, community management, marketing, QA, tests, ticket triage, user support, etc - As soon as you spot a likely candidate, bring it up on the private@ list Step (4) is easy, and I can guide you though that when the time comes. Thanks, -- Noah Slater https://twitter.com/nslater
