Hi all, I've been thinking about things that we could do for Tomcat to help bring in new contributors and to be more appealing to new developers. Right now we have http://tomcat.apache.org/getinvolved.html which has a few bullet points and links to documentation, which is a bit verbose, about how to contribute to an Apache project. We also have the wiki (https://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/FrontPage), which mentions nothing about contributing. Bugzilla is a bit daunting for newcomers (thought we did create the "Beginners" tag to help identify some BZs for new folks to work on) too. I've been looking around for some ideas on how to make it easier for new people to contribute after having some conversations with friends about contributing to Tomcat and found some interesting examples other projects are using to help bring new people in, such as https://wiki.gnome.org/Newcomers (which is my favorite) and https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join. Obviously Tomcat isn't as large of a project as those, but it does have multiple places for people to contribute (Documentation, Patches, FAQ, wiki, etc) which could use different skill sets. This site http://whatcanidoforfedora.org/en would be really cool to implement, but at the ASF level I think (Tomcat isn't complex enough to warrant that, is it?).
Anyway, the point of this email is really just to say that we should take some cues from other projects and try and develop a solid entry ramp to help entice new developers :) What does everyone else think? Thanks, Coty
