Ask HN: How did you attract contributors for your open source project(s)? - adamfaliq
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fundamental
Generally there's the lossy pipeline of get people interested (1) -> give
people a motive to contribute and obtain a first contribution (2) -> foster
the contributions into long term collaboration (3).

Right now my primary target for attracting contributors is a synthesizer
project. It's pretty interesting from the perspective of all the different
working parts, though it does have sizable hurdles to attracting a large
contributor base. Most users don't have a strong programming background and as
such open source contributions appear to be too difficult (limiting 1->2).
Individuals who are familiar with programming may still be unprepared for
domain specific problems limiting the 1->2 transition as well.

Most of my attempts are trying to make the software more approachable in
general, improving general internal quality, presenting the information to
crowds who are familiar with it (multiple conference pubs), presenting it to
groups mostly unfamiliar with it (HN/Reddit style threads/AMAs), encouraging
community members who work on related sub-projects, using most popular hosting
options, posting information on how to get started on the project's web
presence, trying to convey that the project offers opportunities to learn
skills rather than just apply existing ones, etc, etc, etc.

I'm not really sure which techniques really work or not since results are
typically either delayed or are muddled with many different factors.

My newest attempt was based on a suggestion in a HN thread to list possible
project roles (similar to if they were job listings). See
[http://zynaddsubfx.sf.net/contribute.html](http://zynaddsubfx.sf.net/contribute.html)
for that idea in action.

I'm not sure what the next effort will be, though I plan on discussing that on
the project's mailing list this next week. Any suggestions or comments are
welcome.

~~~
arandr0x
I'm the person who made the suggestion, just wanted to say that's a great
page. It's really helping to figure out what are the desired contributions.

Only mildly related but I was actually looking for a synthesizer the past few
weeks (I was just composing stuff I could actually play (and notate) myself
before). Part of what was intimidating me about it was the user interfaces of
that class of software are always super difficult to get started with... So I
guess you gained a new user who does have a programming background!

~~~
fundamental
Yeah, there's a lot of new lingo when you get started with synth interfaces
(both from the design and usage perspectives). One of the goals I had for the
new user interface was to start integrating more visualizations as a means of
giving users feedback on what they're doing.

When you get started out, you just want to mess around an gain an intuitive
feel for how to use something and what knobs do. Unfortunately many soft-
synths miss out on that user feedback (since it's hard to do right).

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geek3point0
Typically supply a tool/app they need. Then hope they want to improve it. My
project gets contributions from the community of users. What I would call
"Drive by" contributors aren't a thing.

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billconan
need to have better documentation,

and should not have a complex code review/ commit procedure

