Some insightful comments on how to grow and sustain contributor communities in OSS:
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Wikitech-l] Roadmaps and getting and keeping devs Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2011 16:55:34 +0000 From: David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> Reply-To: Wikimedia developers <wikitec...@lists.wikimedia.org> To: Wikimedia developers <wikitec...@lists.wikimedia.org> These have been circulating in the open source Twitterspere today. They struck me as apposite to discussions on these topics around MediaWiki. How to write a roadmap: http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2011/02/07/drawing-up-a-roadmap/ How to grow your contributor community (and how to decimate it): http://www.codesimplicity.com/post/open-source-community-simplified/ - d. ------------------------------------- Not always applicable to all of our (sub)projects, but we can surely take some things from this. Two things from the second link that SMW should concretely improve (in co-operation with all extension projects): (1) A list of easy starting projects (nothing there right now). (2) Excellent, complete, and simple documentation describing exactly how a contribution should be done (largely incomplete, and focussed on general hints/rules/warnings but not on concrete contribution paths). It might be worth thinking about how this can be achieved. (2) could help all SMW extensions if placed visibly on our homepage (with pointers to extensions that welcome new contributors). (1) could allow more "non-critical" features (that are fun for newcomers) to get implemented at all (the core devs tend to focus on bug fixing and large-scale projects). In our case, this could also be a list of projects that could be done as mini-extensions. I recall having similar discussions in the past, but our start page clearly lacks the big fat "Contribute" button with easy first steps. Contributions are welcome ;-) Cheers, Markus ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The ultimate all-in-one performance toolkit: Intel(R) Parallel Studio XE: Pinpoint memory and threading errors before they happen. Find and fix more than 250 security defects in the development cycle. Locate bottlenecks in serial and parallel code that limit performance. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devfeb _______________________________________________ Semediawiki-devel mailing list Semediawiki-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/semediawiki-devel
