IMHO - There are two things that must be done. (1) New developers must get their questions answered or at least a response from someone in a timely manner. This is done to convince the user that there is a community.
(2) Developers need to be sharing their code and ideas in trunk and work on the code IN PUBLIC and ON THIS LIST! Otherwise we are all individuals and not a community. Otherwise there is little opportunity for growth. United we rise but divided we fall. Your other points then will be workable! Our point (2) are just two sides to the same coin. If anyone is talking on IRC somewhere about ODFToolkit then please come here. Regards, Dave On Jan 1, 2014, at 10:09 AM, Rob Weir wrote: > I'd like to see if we can grow the community a bit more in the next > month or so. We've been a very quiet project compared to some. We > have just two public mailing lists, no blog, no new articles written > about us. If we can better publicize the project then we will grow. > > I think of a pyramid. At the base are the users, those who get some > benefit from using the ODF Toolkit. Some fraction of the users will > contact the project, maybe submit a bug report. They also help spread > the word about the project to their colleges. Some fraction of these > "engaged" users will then send a patch or express interesting in > helping with the project. That's the next level up on the pyramid. > And some fraction of those developers will become committers. > > The idea of this analogy is if we grow the base, we grow the whole > thing, including contributors and committers. > > So a suggestion on how we can make a big advance: > > 1) Let's get out a new release in January. > > 2) In parallel we can revise our "get involved" page: > > http://incubator.apache.org/odftoolkit/get-involved.html > > For example, do we have any specific ideas for what new developers > can/should work on? Obviously bug reports. But do we have a "wish > list" of possible enhancements/features that we should list? It makes > it easier for a new volunteer if we can point to some ideas. > > If others can contribute ideas I can edit them on the website. > > 3) To attract more users we need an up to date tutorial or demo. > Maybe what we have is fine? Or do we need something "sexier"? > > 4) With the new release I can help publicize the Toolkit and the > project on my personal blog. And we can all help in this area with > Twitter, etc. If we want we can request a project blog via > blogs.apache.org. This have many readers as well. > > Any other ideas? > > -Rob
