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Recruitment Options For a Small-Scale FOSS Project?
thermian writes "I've been developing my open source project for several years now, and I've never found a solution to one fairly important issue. How can a small-scale project attract new members? My project is pretty specialist, (no URL, sorry, I can't afford to get my server nuked) and I find that while it gets a fair bit of use, most users come to my software out of a need to solve their problem, or use my tutorials to learn about the subject, and none seem inclined to stick around and help make the product better. This is a fairly serious problem for me now, because my software has recently been adopted by a university, and I'm just not in a position to manage the entire set of applications and update everything on my own. Just preparing a version for release to students has been especially hard. The open source maxim 'Many eyes make all bugs shallow' only works if those 'many eyes' are available. So do you have any suggestions as to how, and where, to find people who fancy joining open source projects?"
Suggestion: post your project name.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
In that case, you could ask the university to actively encourage students to improve your software as a part of a smaller project (Implement this feature, find some bugs, etc). You could also ask the university to finance a developer for this specific issue, or maybe put a proffessor with a clue on the job.
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
It's really difficult to give advice without knowing the specifics. For instance, you might have luck adding a plugin system, so that the barrier to entry is low enough for more people to join in without feeling like they have to become a proper developer. But that only works for some types of application.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Not publicizing the project name suggests you're either guarded with the project... and if you're concerned about the bandwidth, you're probably self-hosting, which means you're probably not on SF.net, Berlios, etc... which in itself suggests you're not as open as you'd like to think you are. Also, it sounds like you want someone specifically to share the workload, but you didn't mention any form of reimbursement. Nobody who's any good will volunteer to be your employee. If you want an employee you have to pay, and if you want a partner you have to share. At first glance, it doesn't look like there's much of either going on.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
For some people shameless self-promotion feels very sleazy. Apart from that, not everyone looking for help on their project is going to get a story on Slashdot. His question was probably accepted because it was legit and not just an attempt to tap /. for talent.
If he would have included info about the project there would have been a dozen +5 Funny post that said: "Well for starters you could try posting on /. harharhar."
Personally I find this question interesting an I think it warrants more than "post the link".
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
Get accepted into the Google Summer of Code!
... and very exciting to see the increase in developer interest!
It's becoming increasingly more competitive for organizations to become accepted as the program continues to evolve, but any established project with a vibrant user community has the potential to get accepted. Once accepted, Google basically provides an incentive for students to become involved with a project's development by seeding them with a summer stipend. It's a little more involved than that, but that's the gist.
This is the first year BRL-CAD gets to participate and I can already say it's looking to be a lot of fun. It forces a project to organize, coordinate, market, and communicate more. It's a lot of work but well worth it
Cheers!
Sean
Money is often the best solution. Think of it as a "on-demand" project. If they want the bugs to get fixed, they should pay.
The downside is that if the pay ends up being greater than the price for some commercial software, you're screwed. I think this is one of the reasons why many Open Source projects fail. Not large enough userbase.
Perhaps another solution would be offering the software to other universities, and ask for help there.
In other words, you and the OP are mad that you can't get people to work for free? Free software *means* giving.
If you have a user list then quite often a plea for programmers/testers will achieve results. I have done this a few times for my major project and it has always worked.
I also disagree wiht parent that you should have posted the url on slashdot. You would have been slashdotted, for sure, the chances of finding interested developers is low. Most would have just been idle browsers.
A post on your own user list is far more likely to give results since the users have a vested interest in the software and are far more likely to be open to being "recruited".
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Suppose your user base where bigger. Say 100k users. Or 10 million. Could anyone still expect you to help out anyone of those users? Ofcourse not, and in that case these 10M users would be forced to help themselves (to some degree) anyway. The same goes for a university that decides to add X students to your userbase.
Probably it's more a question of why you are working on the project, and what you get from that. Set your own priorities, decide how much time you want to invest, and go from there.
May I suggest you ask the university to do some inhouse filtering of issues/questions (eg. using a local webpage / contact person), and give you a regularly updated 'top 10' list of what they consider most urgent/important.
- If you want to support the widest possible userbase, then you might work on those issues that *also* affect other users of your project.
- If you put this university first, then you could work their list from the top down.
- If you're just doing it for fun, you could cherrypick from their list whatever issue seems most interesting.
--Do only what only you can do. -Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
I'm not mad at all and I have given a lot to both projects.
My point is that there is a myth that "if you build it they will come", it's not true because people want the reputation for contributing to popular projects not my useful but no name projects. It doesn't look as impressive on their CV.
I'm sorry to word this so aggressively, but what the hell are you doing? Open Source does not mean "I am free labor for everyone." Nor does it mean, "I am a doormat, please walk all over me."
Listen, I'm no Linux kernel developer. I'm a poetry guy who was looking for a cheap way to get my poems out in front of eyeballs back in 1994, and coincidentally the Web had just appeared. So I'm only a long-time Web geek at best. And maybe that's not the kind of experience that some would respect. But I've put out probably 100 Open Source products in that time -- 50 phpBB mods, 10 Greasemonkey scripts, 5 Movable Type plugins, and a handful of awful, awful old scripts that nobody should ever use. I'm a father of two with a full-time job, and I've have had 15 year-olds tell me they couldn't be bothered to read the readme, because their time is more valuable than my own. I've had people come to my forums, stomp their virtual feet, and demand that I support them for free in much better fashion. After all, they ask, why did I release a product if I don't intend to add their feature requests and do the installations for them?
Listen, their agendas are not your agendas. Their timetables are not your timetables. And most most MOST importantly, your job is not to be their serving wench. It's not a job at all! Get it straight in your head what you are doing this for. I can't tell you why you do it, but making yourself so stressed out that you have to post on Slashdot begging for help (but not giving out your project name, so you can be an even bigger martyr when it all goes south) IS NOT THE REASON.
You know what I do? I say yes if I can, maybe if maybe, and no if I cannot. And I mean it. Don't make it more than that. Stop feeling obligated. And if you made promises that do obligate you in ways that you cannot meet, it's not the end of the world, but get back to the table and renegotiate. If people blackmail you with statements like "I guess I need another product" or "YOU put it out there, YOU DO IT" then just put that burden right to the side. I don't get bothered that someone might uninstall the app. They're cutting their losses (their lost time) and in the process they cut my losses (of time invested in someone who cannot help himself or herself) too. If you say you cannot build a feature and someone complains, tell them to build it. Seriously. Don't be mean, don't be vindictive, don't be snide. Mean it. If you are stressed and this isn't even your paying job, then draw lines and see who comes to your side. If they don't, then it didn't really matter to them. In which case, you're free to work on what matters to you, in a way that is healthy and sane.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
One of your issues is likely to be that your users are people wanting to run simulations and the people you need to help with programming are programmers who are interested in n-body simulation. Any time you have two narrow slices of the population as your user pool and contributor pool, it's harder to find users who are also able and willing to contribute.
Most big projects are more general-purpose. Everyone needs a text editor or email client. Many people need a database or web server. Programmers are big users of things like text editors, programming language tools, and project management systems. Communications tools like email, IM, IRC, web servers, CMSes, etc. are very popular as projects because of what they are and who uses them.
The best way to find people who have both interest and ability in the areas you need for your project is to find people familiar with the problem and hold their hand getting them up to speed on your code. It's much easier to teach someone with domain experience how the program represents their data and manipulates it rather than to teach a programmer with no domain experience what they need to know for the simulation. You may find some others who already have both sets of knowledge, but they're probably busy people (and might even already be writing competing software).
One thing you might consider is searching for similar projects that are also open source and more or less defunct, and see about merging projects or sharing code back and forth. If you could find another project or two working towards the same goals you might be able to propose a standard data format or compatible plug-in interfaces. That would save a bunch of time for all involved, and would make sharing code in the future even easier.
- writing better developer-level documentation
- providing a list of "starter projects"
- giving talks and webinars about Amanda's internals
- rewriting parts of the application in a more accessible language (Perl)
- making myself highly available for answers and advice
I've tried to increase investment by