This is a follow-up message to Making Contributing Code Easier. That whole thought process came out of this idea.
A good way to get more people to take the step of contributing would be to have a one-off Bug Week - like the QA bug day, but an entire week where someone knowledgeable (well, many people, on a rota) were hanging out in a given IRC channel with their time 100% spent answering questions. New potential contributors could be walked through whatever steps were necessary to get them up and running, and would be lead through the patch-making process. Having done it once that way, and become familiar with the process, they could do it on their own next time. The point is that helping in this way is not nearly as hard as it looks once you are up and running, and (if they had to do that) once you have a build environment set up and working, you don't have to do that again ever. It needs to be a week, because this can't be achieved in a few hours. People need to be able to do some stuff on Tuesday night, a bit more on Thursday and finish up on Saturday afternoon. There needs to be continuity, and a flexibility around people's schedules. We'd publicise it well in advance - newsgroups, MozillaZine, front page etc., and encourage everyone to come and have a go at fixing a bug or two. A good time might be around the end of October - six weeks from now. Gerv
