Over in another thread there has been some discussion of "easy tasks" being identified to help newcomers find their way in the OOo project.
In the ASF the Community Development project works to make ASF projects a little more accessible. Typically it's very scary for a newcomer, regardless of their background. The ASF is a big place where everyone seems to know one another. Here at OOo we have a very big project with a deep and rich history. the problem of attracting and engaging newcomers is probably even more pronounced here. One of the things we do is encourage projects to tag "easy tasks" in their issue tracker.We also encourage projects to offer to mentor people who want to tackle one of these tasks. Now an ASF project community is should be mentoring newcomers anyway, so explicitly stating a mentor is available for some tasks may seem strange. but we have found that just having the words "mentor" associated with a project task makes it more approachable. Another benefit of doing this is that when it comes around to Google Summer of Code time the project already has a bunch of tasks identified that would be suitable for GSoC applications. The ASF has been involved with GSoC since it first started., We usually get between 35 and 50 projects, and most of them are successful. We've even got a few ASF members who started life as GSoC students, became committers and are now working across multiple projects. So, i would encourage people to mark "easy tasks" that they would be willing to help guide people on with a label of "mentor" (which means ensuring questions from someone tacking the problem are answered, it does not mean putting in so much effort you can have done the job yourself in less time). Finally, I'll repeat Rob's observations elsewhere. Easy tasks should not be meaningless tasks. They should be real tasks that will add real value to the project. Ask yourself, if it's easy and your not going to do it yourself is it really necessary? There are plenty of tasks that would be nice to have but not essential, these are good candidates for mentored tasks. Finally, I'd like to hear from the OOo education project. Are there any existing programmes in the Oo.o community that we should work with? Ross
