How to attract new developers for your team
Report about MoM and SoB, seeking more ideas
In Blends it is one goal to tie strong connection to upstream and users
of specific software for the simple reason that we as generalists
usually do not have enough knowledge about these specific programs.
However, we try to spread our competence of building packages and
finally designing an universal operating system. I have implemented two
formalisms to provide this knowledge to newcomers: Mentoring of Month
(MoM) and Sponsering of Blends (SoB). In both cases I try to solve the
dilemma that you finally have no "grip" on volunteers. They could come
and go and you never know whether they will finally commit the code they
promised to provide. Both efforts are trying to serve a certain interest
of the newcomer and I'm offering to trade my personal time for the time
the newcomer is working for Debian. The two efforts are not showing an
exciting result but something was done that would not have been possible
without it. In this BoF I'd like to gather more ideas how we could
attract active newcomers to the Debian project.
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