Recruiting Developers!

[Tiago Mello]

Hey,

Excerpts from Max Kanat-Alexander's message of Sun Jan 23 07:30:32 -0200 2011:
>     Hey! So, I feel like since I did the community research, the Bugzilla
> community has been a pretty enjoyable place to come and contribute code.
> So I don't feel like there are massive barriers to entry, anymore, and I
> think that many people will stick around if they do show up.

Indeed!

> 
>     However, we need more people to show up! How do we get new developers?
> What are some bright ideas for encouraging new people to help out on the
> Bugzilla Project?

Well, I think people show up when they: 1. Use Bugzilla, 2. When they need
any help on customizations, bug fixes, etc, 3. When they want their customization/bug fixes
to be in upstream, 4. They have fun when programming in Perl :), 5. etc.

So I think the main reason people show up is because Bugzilla does not do what they want, and
eventually, they starting contributing with things they think are interesting for the community.

The more they get patches accepted, the more they will contribute.

New ideas/features for Bugzilla also help to motivate people to show up, because they see Bugzilla
as a good place to make suggestions. The 'Make Bugzilla Pretty' initiative I think is an excellent way
to start.

I see people complaining that Bugzilla is written in Perl. There are lot of misunderstanding around there
about Perl, saying Perl is evil is hard to learn and understand... But it's our obligation to prove the 
opposite and show Bugzilla as a good example of how Perl can be applied.

More meeting also I think can help... Meetings can be setup not only for a small group of people, but
we could provide an way to everyone to participate, also, since we are a global team, we could organize 
meetings in our location based on previous meeting contents. Also, every location has at least one open source
conference and we should submit papers for them to take advantage of the meeting and show Bugzilla. We could
talk about cases of success of Bugzilla, how to customize Bugzilla using extensions, how fun is to contribute!
Etc.!

>     Also, who would like to be in charge of encouraging new people to start
> working on Bugzilla? You don't have to be a developer--anybody with
> ideas or experience in this area would be totally eligible.

I can help, but I don't think it should be one person only, but a team.

Tiago