Didn't know you already tried this kind of incentive when CN1 was launched. But I think that one of the mistake was to say you would reward a free basic subscription for any contribution. Had you said you MAY give a reaward (at you convenience) for a contribution if you consider it a worth one (bug fix, significant contribution...), you probably wouldn't have experience bad contributions of people only attracted by the reward. Using a system of points rather than direct $ reward would also avoid putting the $ sign on community work (we could imagine others points usage than just converting them into a $ coupon for services) Anyway, it was just an idea on how you could try to improve the community involvment into CN1. Because unlike you may say, 21 contributors on a project like CN1 is really few. You focussed on Flutter (that is quite recent and probably didn't reach the 40000 developpers yet, which is why I mentionned it in the comparison) but I also compared to the OpenFL project (where the team is pretty much one guy and that is less promoted than CN1 and probably less popular (I doubt that it reached 40000 developpers)). I could also have mentionned libgdx (https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx) that is also quite similar. Your comparison to robovm is not fair as robovm is just a vm and not a multiplatform developpment Framework (it compares to your parparVM for example) so if you want to compare to Xamarin, you should sumup the contributions of xamarin-android (https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-android), xamarin-macios (https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-macios) and Mono (https://github.com/mono/mono) ...
On Saturday, May 19, 2018 at 7:32:04 AM UTC+2, Shai Almog wrote: > The contributors to flutter are Google employees in the Dart team which is > a HUGE team. They need that many people because the architecture of their > VM is pretty complicated (not a very good sign). > > It makes more sense to compare us to a project that was shorter lived but > highly visible and highly promoted by Oracle/Xamarin: > https://github.com/robovm/robovm/graphs/contributors > Our numbers would have been better had we not worked on Google Code until > it was shutdown. We should have been on github sooner. > > Despite all of the people who work on Flutter they don't have a fraction > of the API/library support that we already have with the limited resources > at our disposal. > > Most open source projects don't get a lot of 3rd party contributions, > especially complex projects (e.g. us). To me the code contribution aspect > isn't a huge deal. I care far more about bug reports, questions & community > advocacy all of which could also use improvement. > > This isn't the first thread that mentioned this. We made a lot of attempts > in the past to increase community engagement and most of them weren't very > successful. Even basic things like being active on reddit/other sites or > writing an article in medium etc. Most developers don't even submit their > app to the gallery... > > I know the head of the flutter team has personal calls with developers to > encourage them to write about the platform. You can literally see the > marketing copy he helps them insert into their posts. Unfortunately we > don't have the ability to do that. > > About giving bonuses to contribution we did exactly that when we launched. > We offered a free basic subscription for code contribution & for people who > shared information in social networks to help promote our brand. This > didn't result in anything. Worse, it created a bad incentive for > contribution that triggered bad contributions with the purpose of getting a > free subscription. > > This further creates a bad incentive by putting a $ sign on the work > community developers do... (I don't know if you read Freakonomics but it > has a wonderful explanation on the nuances of negative incentives). I think > the main value of contribution should be the contribution itself & being a > part of the community. If we offer money (or equivalent) we devalue the > work which is arguably worth more. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CodenameOne Discussions" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/codenameone-discussions. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/codenameone-discussions/f72e6a55-288a-47e2-b1e2-aa00601c2813%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
