Hi devs , As we can see number of new people start contributing to Axis2 project we need to simplify and improve the contribution process. Since we can't expect same set of developers to stay on the project forever we should encourage new people to to contribute in order to keep healthy project. Personally I fell still there are numbers of steps we can introduce to this project to encourage new contributors.
1.) AFAIK at the moment we (committers) can assign JIRA issue to some other committers only there is no way to assign JIRA issues to contributors. As I remember in Woden and number of other Apache projects provide this facility. IMO we need to remove this restriction so that committers can assign issues to contributors too. I believe in this way new contributors feel some strong ownership and kinda relationship with the project. 2.) Currently when ever new contributor ping to the dev list we ask to go through JIRA page and pick a issue and start contribution. Some people end up being active contributors but some of them select JIRA issues those are not obvious to fix or there is no developer willing to review those patches or no one here to provide proper guidance, in all those cases final result is people get frustrated and stop contribution. What I would like to suggest here is once the committers feel a particular issue is easy to fix or if he know the procedure (may be no time to fix it ) or if he willing to provide guidelines / reviews to a contributor mention it in the JIRA issue itself. we can use some kind of a label like Contributor/Easy/QuickStart or something similar to that as an indication so that new people can easily find those JIRA issues. 3.) We should create "How to contribute " page for the reference of new contributors. For the moment we have number of nicely written guides about developers ( release process , site building , mailing etc ) that covers most part of details required to new contributors too but IMO it much useful to have a separate page for new contributors. Any other suggestions ? or objections ? If we can agree on above ( or more ? ) I'm happy to start this process. Thanks ! -- Sagara Gunathunga Blog - http://ssagara.blogspot.com Web - http://people.apache.org/~sagara/ LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/in/ssagara --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
