Hi Noah, Thank you for mentioning this worry and for all the good ideas to create more traction.
It's an overwhelming lot of work, so I don't think we can ask anyone in particular to do all this, but that we all need to be more proactive in promoting the project. One part that I think I can help with is maybe blogging about how we use MetaModel in the case of DataCleaner ( www.datacleaner.org). You mention that we should have a project blog. How is that done? I have a personal blog that I could post it on, but what is the usual approach when making a project blog? Kasper 2014-04-02 14:22 GMT+02:00 Noah Slater <[email protected]>: > 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 >
