Re: [Ksummit-2013-discuss] [ATTEND] How to act on LKML

Sarah Sharp
2013-07-17T15:02:03Z

On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 09:03:35AM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> The point I'm making is that we need to find out what is preventing good
> developers from joining the Linux community. Is it really the harshness
> of the project, or is it because we expect you to have the best code,
> and you will not be accepted if you are not that good. And I do not want
> people joining that are not good programmers.

Or does our documentation for getting new developers on board suck? Or
do we simply need to have more mentors to help newcomers move from their
first checkpatch cleanup patch to larger projects? Or do minorities
simply choose not to participate, because they see homophobic emails
like the 'deep throat' email, and decide they're likely to face racism
or sexism on the mailing list as well?

There are a lot of reasons newcomers don't want to join, or don't feel
they can join. Unless we did some sort of survey to ask why people
don't participate, we won't know why they aren't.

Oh, BTW, someone did do an informal survey on why people do or don't
contribute to open source project. They gave a talk at Open Source
Bridge entitled, "No, I won't contribute to your OS project". You can
see the results of her poll, and her talk here:

https://www.zotero.org/groups/obridge_2013_os_contrib
https://www.dropbox.com/s/c6vjtx1zcdzejgw/foss_contributions.pdf

> The answer is not to bash Linus into being a nice guy (which seems to be
> what Sarah's trying to do), but we can get mentors or even "scouts" to
> look for people of talent and help them get into the community. What
> those people need is not a nicer LKML that will let mediocre developers
> in, but someone that recognizes their talent and encourages them to
> join, by reinforcing to them how good of a developer they are. I've
> helped people this way. Talented programmers that were unsure of
> themselves, and they have done extremely well in our community.

Are you volunteering to be a mentor for the FOSS Outreach Program for
Women? ;) I will happily take more mentors for the next round in
November!

http://kernelnewbies.org/OPWIntro

Sarah Sharp