How to Get More Contributors

The following is a draft.

Basic assumption: People do not become contributors because they agree to the cause. They become contributors because of habit: They start as users, communicate, interact and finally start to contribute.

Problems

• Ignorance: You can't just advertise to potential contributors when you need them. You got to do it all the time and repeatedly. People don't perceive all information presented to them. In fact, most information is ignored. Thus, potential contributors need many reminders.

• "Bonding": Getting to know to new people is not that easy. This holds for established members getting to know new contributors, but also for new contributors getting to know established members.

GNOME has advantage here, since potential contributors are interested in GNOME's cause and products. They also know about established members due to hackergotchis and the GNOME planet. People recognize faces really fast.

Potential Solutions

We can't really solve the above problems. But we could leverage our advantages: We can change the institutions (the ways GNOME members communicate) to include contributor advocacy as an integral part of communication.

Option 1: Use existing resources

1.) Advocate the GNOME user forum to existing community members:

This is a great place to find new contributors of the non-technical kind. This is due to some unique features of forums, in general:

• Reputation system build in: If a question is answered by somebody with several hundred posts, people feel more confident about it.
• Recognition system built-in: By using hackergotchis as avatars, people recognize eachother more easily. It also helps people to recognize contributors from the planet.
• Promotion build-in: By using signatures, every contributors can advocate his or her own goal, for example using a certain application, becoming a contributor, etc.
• Editing build-in: People can edit their posts after submission; this is useful for non-native English speakers.
• SEO could be build-in: Forum posts are not mirrored and don't get archived all over the Internet, spaming search engines.

The first two options do not exist with mailing lists. However, existing GNOME members don't like the forum because new post doesn't come automatically. This is a technical problem that could be solved by integrating mail somehow.

2.) Advocate Stackoverflow to existing community members:

Using Stackoverflow as a support channel has some advantages:

• Platform Promotion build-in: By sending all development support questions over there, the GNOME platform is automatically promoted. Relevant tags become more prominent.
• Reputation build-in: By reputation scores and badges, people can trusts other people more easily.
• Recognition system built-in: By using hackergotchis as avatars, people recognize each other more easily. It also helps people to recognize contributors from the planet.
• Better organization: By tags, ...
• Subscription build-in: Each tag has a feed that people can subscribe to.

3.) Advocate removal of existing alternative options:

Users of the current support mailing lists may not switch because they got used to the mailing lists. Therefore, it may be necessary to shut them down in the long run. Mailing lists about internal development and organization remain intact, of course.

Option 2: Build a new resource

1.) Rebuild Stockoverflow as an internal resource:

Should not be that hard with things like Django.

Disadvantages:

• People would not find it 'automatically' unless we invest some work into making it friendly to search engines.
• GNOME becomes less prominent on Stackoverflow, creating the impression that it's less relevant.

2.) Advocate removal of existing alternative options:

See above.