
How to Attract More People to Your Open Source Project - abennett
http://www.itworld.com/open-source/78643/how-attract-more-people-your-open-source-project
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pieter
I'm not sure I would follow all this advice.

As the maintainer of GitX, I have difficulty in keeping some kind of community
running. One of the things that I'm definitely _not_ going to do is add more
ways of communication (A newbie forum, irc channel, etc). As it is now,
communication between people is already somewhat difficult.

My main way to communicate is the mailing list, which is quiet enough to post
everything you want to. However, I also have a bugtracker on lighthouse where
some people file a bug, to be left there forever. Then some people use the
commenting system on github, which also get ignored mostly. Some people send
me a pull request through github, which means it just sits in my mailbox
without alerting others who might want to review it.

Then there are folks who email me privately. I try to answer everything, but
often have to repeat stuff because it's in private mail. Then some folks
report a bug on the mailing list, or on the bug tracker, or privately, and I
have to figure out what went where. Then there are also duplicate bug reports
that I have to track down, and close one of them. There are also some cases of
multiple people contributing a patch for the same issue.

There are enough ways to communicate now, and I'm thinking of closing some of
those options. I'd like to disable messages in github, but that's not
possible. I'm probably going to set an auto-responder to pull requests, asking
folks to send mails to mailing list. I might make the bugtracker private, and
ask everybody to post to the mailing list.

In short, I don't think it's the lack of communication options, but more that
the few folks that do work on a small project are spread across too many
different communication systems.

~~~
pmjordan
I'd probably keep the bug tracker public, make it _the_ place for filing bugs,
and immediately copy & paste any bugs reported via other means into a new
tracked bug, and reply with the URL for that bug. Bug tracking in a mailing
list is messy, especially if that list is also used for general discussion.

