I’m hoping to get some feedback from the general developers list on potential outreach activities for the project. To set the background for this discussion, Quickstep became an Apache project earlier this year. Nearly all the people on the project are relatively new to the Apache way of doing things (I certainly am, and I’m still learning various aspect of the Apache way).
Our mentors have been very helpful and rightly point out that we need to do more by way of outreach. This would include (but not limited to) doing things like: #1: Making a release #2: Writing blogs about the project #3: Going to meetups and conferences like Apache Con to make a presentation about the project (we can find ways to fund these meetings). #4: Using the dev list more actively, even if it is to discuss interesting observations that we make – e.g. tried the new Xcode, and ran into the following issues. Note on #4, I personally feel that we have a lot of active discussions. But, our primary mechanism is via Jiras and the discussion on the PRs. They are quite lively at times, and it is fantastic that people express their views in a respectful way but are not shy to point out any critical comments that they may have. We need to keep doing this. All those comments do go to the dev lists, but we should also talk about other things like what we think would be great to work on next, and/or just announce what topics you may be working on. So, the main question in this email is: Are there folks on this list who want to help with building the Quickstep community in the ways described above? If you are interested, can you let this group know what you might want to help with. Also free free to pitch any ideas that you may have to help build the community. The main point is to get more people excited about the project in any role (including developers, users, …) and to share responsibilities for the core direction of the project. One concrete proposal is to go make a release in about a month. I’m happy to help with that. Anyone else wants to help out? Now you may ask – what does it take to do a release? I honestly don’t know. But, we have to go read up on that, bug the mentors, and figure it out. All that is part of helping build an Apache community. Cheers, Jignesh
