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How To Sponsor an Open Source Sprint
Esther Schindler writes "Does your favorite open source project need just a little extra functionality? As Esther Schindler explains in this IT World article, your company can encourage the developers to add the features you've been yearning for — for far, far less money than you imagine. She interviews companies who have sponsored 'code-a-thons' for Drupal, Plone, simwiddy, and a set of applications for British Telecom, and provides specific pointers. From the article: 'To ensure that the event happens and that it meets its goals, you must connect with the right members of the community and motivate them to work with you. "It's not like these people are paid to work for your interests," points out Brightcove's Whatcott. If your business already has project committers on its staff, then it's just a matter of leveraging existing relationships. But, says Stahl, "Someone less 'core' in the community might well have a harder time.'"'
It's ok - it's SimWitty. Good work Slashdot editors!
Graham
This isn't likely to work for anything that needs to be architected, or is at all complex. What you're going to get, at best, is a collection of un-integrated features in search of a design. Of course, for some applications, that's good enough.
PyPy, the Python implementation written in Python, was developed in big "sprints". Six years on, it still doesn't work well enough to be used for anything.
There are too many bad programmers out there for "crowdsourcing" to work well. I put a moderately simple job on Rent-A-Coder once - I wanted an open source Python program to read WHOIS data from any registrars. This requires a tiny module for each registrar, and after writing a few myself I decided to outsource the next hundred registrar-specific modules. Four "Rent-A-Coder" programmers failed on that job.
4. The target audience uses phrases like "leverage existing relationships".