Is there any way the Getting Involved page can link to the source code of the projects and their bug/dev trackers so people can help with the planned features and existing bugs? Even without much information about the big picture there must be some things that the contributors could take care of.
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And another thing. When I did a bit of code fixing (PHP) on the nightlies download page years ago, my code was at least partially reverted and another fix was written without even having the chance to do it myself. Being unaware that the code interacted (and how) with other pages (there were no comments), I did what was best for the page I got the code for, but instead of being told I should be aware of the rest of the download pages, I got nothing.
So when the project finds developers willing to help, the “first contact” should be improved. It would’ve been different if I got more than one file to handle and been offered even the slightest insight that could’ve helped me do the right thing in the first place. It would’ve been nice if anyone told me to sign up for a developer account somewhere, where I can learn more about the needs of the project, or whatever. Once I handed over my modifications (which solved the bug I reported), we continued our IRC chat like nothing happened.
Maybe at that point in time there were enough contributors and there was no need for more, I have no way to know that. But my first contact was quite dry. And once I registered in this forum and even mentioned I was a Zend Certified PHP Developer, I didn’t see anyone going “hey, would you like to take a look at our PHP-related tasks and maybe help?”
After my initial PHP contribution I really didn’t feel like trying to help again, honestly. Not because I lost my excitement after that “dry first contact”, but because noticing the total lack of interest in drawing me in on other tasks I went back to my other things. The “Getting Involved” page is clearly not enough to get more developers. The human factor really counts, because I can write code and experiment on my own, but for me it’s more fun when I feel like I’m invited, welcome and part of the team, regardless of how small/big.
12 years ago I founded a national community for a CMS (PHP-Fusion), and that’s when I started learning PHP&MySQL. It was interesting for a few years, until I had to find various ways to make our people get more involved, to come up with initiatives and take some responsibility for some small components. The truth is the CMS market is a bit brutal these days, with the social networks and free blogging platforms covering the people’s needs to publish stuff, organize and communicate in groups, and so on. So a regular CMS would only be extra work for the non-technical people, who gave up bothering with domains, FTP, maintenance, backups, outages and stuff. Without a business model, donations, or even enough ambition in my team’s members, I was mostly alone in the efforts of keeping the community alive and fresh by coming up with new stuff for our users.
I don’t care about keywords like “self-reliance” as in everyone works independently to get some job done. To me that’s the opposite of fun in an open source project. I love web development but for me it’s only rewarding if I’m around people who (ironically) are self-reliant enough to come up with ideas, plans, solutions and talk about them openly with the rest of the team, so you can actually get a sense of collaboration, consensus and push things forward as a team, each with their responsibilities.
So from the sum of my experiences here, the Haiku team didn’t feel like the right place for me. The Getting Involved page could also have a section called Culture, to lay out a few words how people work and interact in this project, so those interested can figure out on their own what they should expect. So if my experience was different than what’s really going on, at least I’d know to poke around later instead of feeling unwelcome and go back to whatever I did before.
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