On Thursday 08 March 2007, Pierre Habouzit wrote: > It will likely be one of my last post on that matter because I feel > that valuable contributors left it long ago. gee, thanks for the (probably unintented as the above statement includes yourself) implied insult > You're (not you Matthias, You the other people with those ideas) take > the problem from the wrong side. The question is not about _how_ to > attract people, > but how did people that are now valuable contributors were attracted to > what they do right now. When you'll know that we will be able to improve > those things so that it gets even more attractive than now. err ... logical flaw above "look at how current contributors got attracted, and improve on what attracted them" is a particular solution to the question "how do we go about attracting people" Also as I've pointed out several times in this thread now: _I_ got attracted as contributor to Debian because I saw a mail asking for help with something small and easy (and that gave an easy step-by-step on how to get involved with that). -> the approach of sending mails asking for help that you've labeled pointless is an example of exactly what you say you're looking for above. > Just know that none of the suggestions made so far would have helped me > more when I was searching who/what to help, it would even have bored me. point to keep in mind is that "people are different, respond to different things, and take different approaches" -> periodically asking in different ways makes sense, as does trying to making sure that whatever the path somebody might take to getting involved. That someone is likely to notice your request for help. > shouting for help everywhere is like noise: it's absurdly painful, and > will itch people way too much. There's a difference between 'shouting' and 'politely and invitingly asking for help' (or to use your metaphore noise has levels it's not a question of noise or no noise). As usual the key is balance: - you don't want to overdo it by constantly spamming every available channel. - But you don't want to go to the other extreme either. For example (and please keep in mind that I do _not_ mean this to be an attack on either you or the kde team) the information in this thread tells me that it has been over a year since the single mail from the kde team asking for help with bugs. Now that undoubtfully doesn't give the entire picture, as I'm sure there've been RFH's in other channels then debian-kde. Still it's been over a year since the last RFH on the debian-kde list, that's a rather long time. IMO a frequency of a couple (say 3 or 4) of RFH's per year would seem more likely to produce results. That said nobody is forcing you or any other DD/packaging team to ask for help in any particular way (or at all). So no need to get all worked up, if you find the suggestions in this thread impractical/useless then by all means ignore them, they're only suggestions. -- Cheers, cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis)
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