![Popular open source software is more secure than unpopular open source software, because insecure software becomes unpopular fast. [That doesn't happen for proprietary software.]](../sites/all/themes/drupal4hu/images/bg-center/bg-center_4.png)
I often lament that new Drupal community members are not like "old" and they are not contributing enough. But... do they have enough incentive and guidance? I go to drupal.org, click download, gather everything I need to create a site, I can't see much asking for contributing. The Documentation top tab is better because that does ask but then again it's a bit of a "wall of a text" and people might just skip it. How can we better guide the newcomers to turn to contributors?
Commenting on this Story is closed.
At this point Drupal pretty much works. Many of the remaining bugs are, I suspect, rather difficult to fix or they would have already been fixed, and many of the places where there is still room for improvement require big API or comprehensive front-end reconceptualizations that require a lot of coordination.
It's still relatively easy to figure out how to help out with contrib modules, but with core, it's much less clear to me.
It would be great to have a Contrib tab at the top of drupal.org that leads to an organizational chart of sorts that breaks down the main core projects and the team leaders and main contributors to those projects. Rather than dividing core and contrib or breaking things down into Drupal 6, Drupal 7, etc, I think the descriptions of these major development efforts should overlap (to better reflect how Drupal actually gets developed and improved and they should also reveal some (unofficial or not) road map information so one doesn't need to spend hours/days/years sussing out road map info from issue queue threads. A lot of road map info lives inside the heads of certain prominent developers but doesn't get published. Publishing provisional road maps would inspire a lot more people to jump in, and the road maps could always been revised.
Who's leading RDF? Who's leading Fields? Who's leading UX improvements? Media integration? Views into core? Panels/Blocks consolidation? Those of us who know, know. But let's make it really easy for newcomers to find out.
Just to make my point more clear, I think it's crazy that the contribute to core page essentially points people to the issue queue, which is very low-level. If I want to contribute to, say making the admin interface more usable, or helping Drupal to scale better, I don't want to go pour through a bunch of issue- and patch-specific threads. I want to see first a top-down high-level view of what the current ideas are for improving that area. Then I want to see who's spearheading the efforts and what elements of the code are potentially involved.
It's hard for anyone but coders to really contribute to issue queues. But lots of people could contribute to more high-level conversations about UX, features and architecture etc if only these conversations had an obvious and inviting point of entry.
I recently had asked many people where I have been able to about this(at a medium LUG event at my college and other hacking meetings), and I have also came to the same conclusion:
numbers
it's more efficient to help not so many people to get inside the actual work than spending more time trying to help a little a lot of people.
disposition
the main factor I've seen with direct correlation between "really getting inside" and "stay some time and leave" is disposition: People who have at least some disposition to help, will make things happen. I mean: I've seen many people who came to communities/meetings(mainly what I was involved in) to get something, which is in the opposite side of what I call disposition.
Disclaimer: I hope people reading this take it in the good way, there are a lot of activities in the project development that does not involve coding which are important, but people starting foss use to be developers. So, I think it's a natural concern to expect the same disposition to build software in the people around when community start growing (drupal is now huge!).. so I hope this two little points I mentioned can help people involved to help growing up the community in the way they really want.
That’s good!
That’s good!