Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Recruitment (Reviewers, Testers, Maintainers, Hobbyists)

[Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>]

On Wed, Jul 08, 2015 at 01:21:40AM +0200, Peter Huewe wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> In order to continue our traditions I would like to propose again the topic of 
> recruitment, but this time not only limiting to the hobbyists market.
> 
> We are definitely short on reviewers and thus have mostly overloaded 
> maintainers.
> For testers it's usually even worse - how many patches are actually tested?
> Judging from what I read on LKML not that many.
> 
> So we should definitely discuss:
> - how can we encourage hobbyists to become regular contributors
> -- how to keep people interested, the drop-out rates are huge.
> - encourage regular contributors to become reviewers and testers
> - reviewers to become co-maintainers and finally maintainers (once the 
> original maintainer is used up or moves up/on)

I like this proposal, thanks for making it.  I'd be glad to help talk
about this issue as I spend a lot of time working on dragging companies
and developers into our community.  We have a real lack of ways that
people who are "reasonably skilled yet don't know what to work on" can
do more to help contribute to the kernel.

> -> Or how can we raise more funds to sponsor subsystem maintainer ship e.g. 
> via Linux Foundation. 
> (so that the maintainer atleast can buy some test-hardware)

Buying test hardware is always a good thing, if people have a hard time
with this, let me know, I've been able to get hardware for people in the
past.

> Nominations:
> Jason Cooper           (auto-nominated), last years 'speaker'
> Greg KH				please... ;-)

Again, I'd be glad to help talk about this, thanks.

greg k-h