On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 5:09 AM, Gabor Szabo <szab...@gmail.com> wrote: > My objective is getting more people to contribute to CPAN. > I don't necessarily want more modules. I'd prefer to get more people > involved in maintaining and improving the already existing module.
Reactions off the top of my head: * Be wary of the parallel between "open source projects" and CPAN. There are some CPAN-based "projects" like Padre, Moose or DBIC, but a lot of it is just single libraries with a single lead developer. There are some middle ground areas, too, like Dist::Zilla, with one lead developer (Ricardo) and a lot of people writing plugins for it, all loosely communicating issues and discoveries via IRC on #distzilla. So I encourage you to tune your talk differently depending on which kind of project someone wants to participate in. * For small or single developer projects, volunteers that are not self-motivated and self-directed are often not very helpful, because the opportunity cost of teaching them and managing them is too high. * I agree with Shlomi that a good foundation for any form of participation is knowing how to write a good bug report and a test case to go with it. Sending me a patch without a test case is usually worse (in my opinion) than sending me a test case without a patch. * Knowing how to use subversion and git is also pretty fundamental * Low hanging fruit: contribute a fix to a problem that you personally encountered. That could be a code fix, or improved documentation or even an example program illustrating the issue. It's low hanging fruit because it's an already solved problem and the motivation to share a solution is likely to be higher than the motivation to dive into someone else's bug and sort out the code. -- David
