Thanks to all who took the recent survey on contributing to Chromium and the barriers involved. We've looked at the feedback. A few themes stand out:
* A lot of you would like to contribute more than you currently do. Awesome! * A large number of you find Chromium developers friendly, knowledgeable and helpful, and are able to find the information you need to contribute. * There's a broad desire for more information about current and future work/plans, such as a project roadmap and more granular news about what's going on in the project. In response to this, let me list a few things we, the full-time development team, can do, and some things that folks not on the team can do. Things Google employees can do: * Publish a roadmap. While I don't think we'll ever give details more than a couple of quarters out, and the contents of the roadmap will be pretty high-level, this should at least help show people what our guiding priorities are. For example, for the upcoming milestone 4 release, Mac, Linux, and extensions are the top three priorities, and behind that there's a significant amount of work on memory footprint, stability (crashes), and "jank" (sluggish UI response) going on. One of our product managers is working on this. * Publish meeting/task force notes. We've tried this a few times in the past with poor results, because preparing our notes for public consumption can take a nontrivial amount effort just to produce a doc that isn't that helpful internally, so no guarantees, but we could probably take another shot at it. Things non-Google employees can do: * Visit http://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/getting-involved . Two of the top areas of interest for contributions were in testing builds to file bugs, and helping users. This short page has some links that relate to each of those. In particular, I don't know if people were aware that we have a help forum in which you can answer users' questions, or that if you do a lot of good work commenting on bugs that are duplicates, already fixed, etc. we'll consider giving you editing privileges. There's also a few links on there to get started if you want to find a bug to work on and write some code to fix it. * Give feedback when we do something particularly good, or bad. If we send some meeting notes out and you find them helpful, say so, so we'll have an incentive to keep doing it; if there's a way we could make them better, suggest it. * Summarize "this week in Chromium". We'd love to post a weekly update on the Chromium blog about what's going on in the project. This would be a great chance for someone who actively follows Chromium development to do a service to the rest of the community by writing this. If you're interested, contact me and we'll talk more. There were a number of other good ideas in the surveys, or ways that we could address some of the other issues you raised. In many cases our biggest problem is resource constraints -- having the time and manpower to help administer forums or websites, spending time walking new contributors through the codebase, etc. We'd love to see non-Googlers take the initiative to help meet these kinds of needs, like with the weekly summary I suggested above. If you have a way that you think you can contribute (not just an idea you'd like to see happen), contact me and I'll put you in touch with someone. PK --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Chromium Developers mailing list: [email protected] View archives, change email options, or unsubscribe: http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
