Mandag 08 september 2008 16:25:24 skrev Bryen:
But the question asks "How do we get people to step up." That implies there is a plethora of people with the proper skills out there that aren't stepping up. My belief is that the opposite is more true.
Look at how many people are packaging things in the OBS or at Packman. We also have many programmers using openSUSE. There's a great amount of technically talented people in the community. I think once the contrib repo is established, and factory will be developed in the OBS, we'll see a steady increase in community participation in coding and packaging. Specifically regarding KDE, I think there might be an additional "problem" that people might have gotten a little too lazy - the service has been so good for so long that there hardly have been any itches for anyone to scratch - making users a little complacent.
There are a plethora of people who don't have the proper skills, want to learn the proper skills, and thus cannot step up at this point in time. How often have we heard someone say "Let me know how I can help, but just so you know, I'm no coder."
If people have the required dedication, time and potential to learn these things, nothing's stopping them. And if people display dedication and potential there will also be someone willing to help them a little along the way when needed. But noone wants to handhold someone for hours or maybe even days, just to see them lose interest just as suddenly as they popped up. I'm pretty non- technical myself, but I have seen this a lot of times trying to help people getting started with translating... I really like this Linus Torvalds quote regarding the issue: "I get the question of "Where should I start?" fairly often and my advice is just don't even ask that question. It's more like if you're not interested enough in one particular area that you already know what you want to try to do, don't do it. Just let it go and then when you hit something where you say, "I could do this better" and you actually feel motivated enough that you go from saying that to doing that, you will have answered that question yourself."
What I'd like to see is the openSUSE Board, the community, and Novell take a look at this gap. Think of ways we can mentor people, especially newcomers to acquire the necessary skills to tackle and maintain the various tasks required to keep openSUSE afloat. Either Feed the People, or Teach them to Grow themselves, right?
Surely putting an effort into good docs, maybe the occasional packaging day, etc. is a good idea. But as stated above I don't really buy the premise that there's a mass of people who have the required dedication and talent, who just need a little helping hand. Maybe a better strategy would be to try to figure out ways to attract more developers and techies to openSUSE... I only wish I had some ideas how to do it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org