Building a healthy RPM Fusion contributor community (was: Re: "RPM Fusion is ready for F10 announcement" for fedora-announce-list)

On 25.11.2008 13:37, Michael Schwendt wrote: Sorry, I wanted to find a bit more time to write a proper answer, which took me a while to find time for. Yeah, I had thought about that as well. But: That and someone they can talk to that helps with the first steps -- e.g. a mentor. Leaving people working alone/sending them straight to the lists afaics only works if the one that wants to help really is pushing forward -- otherwise people offer to help but nobody tells them "hey, would you want to work on foo or bar". Or people try something and run into issues that are not getting solved -- like Chris with the planet/blog stuff, that now waits for thias to adjust the DNS :-/ +1 The latter IMHO is the bigger problem, and it's results in a higher hurdle to climb when trying to get involved. And that is not good for us in the long term. Livna showed that, as the entry-hurdle was way to high. Yeah. Sure. And as you said: start somewhere is the point. For infrastrucuture that would be up to our infrastructure leader -- Xavier. But lead is likely the wrong word, as we is the only real contributor that takes care of our infrastructure (with a bit help from me -- but as I said months ago on this list: I don't really want to spend my time on infrastructure things, so I try to keep it to a minimum). I don't want to think what might happen to RPM Fusion if Xavier gets hit my a bus tomorrow :-/ I know. I actually considered to work on it. But then I said to myself "I did so many things over the past few months for RPM Fusion; I won't touch that and just wait if or when somebody else steps up to do it; maybe then others get more involved" EPEL is a really good example, as it's one of the reasons why I'm a bit worried about RPM Fusion in the long run. EPEL's self-organization was far from perfect when I ran the steering committee, but it afaics got a lot whole lot worse since I said "okay, I want to have some more free time to get RPM Fusion running; can somebody else please take care of EPEL" and handled the position over. Since then EPEL afaics is lingering and not really working towards a better and brighter future. Sure, EPEL grew a lot since I moved away from it -- but that's mainly due to more and more Fedora contributors starting to build their package for EL. But nobody really cares of EPEL as a whole afaics. The steering committee for example not even asked me "Why didn't you do the testing->stable move as usually" when I stopped doing them for the first time at the end August this year (it just happened due to me vacationing; it wasn't on purpose). I'm sure that things in EPEL land sooner or later will improve again, as it already has a big community -- sooner or later someone from that community will step up and work towards improving things. But the contributor community for RPM Fusion is a whole lot smaller; and most contributors seems to be focused on packaging (just like in EPEL). Nearly nobody seems to be interested in "keeping things together and running well" or "improving things/creating a healthy project that attracts new contributors and grows". The long time it took us to start for real proves that from my point of view. But maybe it's just me and I'm expecting to much... Strong +1 (that's also the reason why I put the first sentence on http://rpmfusion.org/Guidelines ) +1 And not only docs for contributors are needed. Docs for users are also needed -- especially for the graphics drivers. Bugs like https://bugzilla.rpmfusion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=197 https://bugzilla.rpmfusion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=204 (I had to reopen both, as the underlying problems was not really addressed) and posts like https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2008-November/msg02798.html show that. Cu knurd