I see the tweets going on, inviting people to contribute! That's awesome. It's a real art and challenge for both the people who want to contribute and those who want to help. Figuring how to connect and enable is a team effort for everyone involved.
Here's a couple examples of past attempts to carve out digestible chunks of work for people to do. - https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/5a5b59289d2b4d045154aa29978f94e3362d894a65ca87c9b19a121e@1164234823@%3Cdev.tomee.apache.org%3E - https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/07bdbaf62260d38076495ff24ae4ce1838eee93c92e2315638e1553a@1195845493@%3Cdev.tomee.apache.org%3E Everything listed in the emails is of course work I could have done myself. That's always the case, otherwise you're asking people to instantly come into a project and instantly be better at it than you. The skill you need to develop is how to plan out some work, vividly, that you think is hopefully achievable for people and then help them do it. This is usually very hard as you have to dream up initiatives that you could have people work on that new people can do. Ideally in an hour or half day. Ensure there are many of these tasks. Then file many JIRAs, then advertise them. Even harder is to encourage people to not beat themselves up if they struggle. People tend to be very hard on themselves. I always encourage people to start small. Get your first commit in an hour, get a taste of success, work your way up from there. Most people want to dive straight into the hardest most exciting thing they can imagine, then struggle, stop asking questions for fear of exposing they are struggling, then when they haven't said anything for a long time feel even less able to ask questions, then they hurt themselves. Open source is a team effort. You need to be comfortable failing in front of everyone, everyone needs to be letting you know it's ok encouraging you to do your best and "struggle loudly" so we can all help. *Every* *single* *time* in the last 19 years that I've seen someone be brave enough to struggle loudly and get help, one or two more people suddenly get brave enough to join them. We've voted almost all committers in in twos. Here's a doc I tried to write to encourage a healthy start: - http://tomee.apache.org/dev/contribution-tips.html These days you "EJB Examples" could be "MicroProfile examples" and all the same techniques and advice could work. Someone would need to spend the time to think creatively and make a list of 20+ MicroProfile examples that could be created, then file the jiras. -- David Blevins http://twitter.com/dblevins http://www.tomitribe.com
