Getting more contributions

[IBBoard]

Interestingly, now that we've got a couple of new people around, I recently tripped over an article about Lowering contribution barriers in Open Source.

The OSS ideal is that everyone can help out in whatever way they can, but the reality is often not quite so good. We've got our Get Involved page, and Snowblizz seems to have been putting a link in his sig wherever he could, but I wondered what other suggestions people had. I'm fine on the techy stuff and knowing what I want to do with things, but the larger project/community angle needs some input from the community

Based on the article in the first link, I think we need an obvious "Get Involved" link in the main nav bar, and possibly a prettier (static?) page that makes the choices easier and more obvious.

I think I'm already in-line with Ubuntu's categories, although I like his final list that includes "Evangelist". The Fedora style that borders on "personality type" for some (e.g. "people person", who is presumably a community rep/helper) works quite well as well, but I'd welcome any suggestions.

[IBBoard]

Okay, I've updated our Get Involved page and moved it from the Wiki to the main site. It is also in the nav bar now, so it is a bit more obvious to see for any visitors. The only problem I have at the moment is that I end up with two rows of links when I'm logged in to Trac because the Admin link wraps!

Any thoughts or opinions on the new "Get Involved" page?

[snowblizz]

Purty.

Is it just me or did you borrow it wholesale?

[IBBoard]

I had similar groups before, but I did restructure slightly to match the other groups (separating general "users" from "bug reporters/testers" and grouping them with "community evangelists" instead to keep "finding problems" and "telling people about it" separate).

I do like the Tango themed icons though - always nice, professional and appealing in a subtle way Much better than all this Windows Vista/Windows 7/OS X/KDE shiny rubbish.

[IBBoard]

I've worked out which link to drop - the Roadmap. It wasn't really a roadmap, just a list of milestones (which included multiple components, so you had to scroll to find the core WarFoundry bits) and it wasn't of interest to most people. It is still available if people want to browse it, but isn't in the main nav any more.

[IBBoard]

I'll tack this on here, as it is on a similar topic.

I recently (as in within the last week - I've had a backlog of "links to read and tweet") found a post on Open Source community simplified. It has a few points on how to grow a FOSS community. I think it is quite interesting in some of the points it covers, and it is mainly something from my PoV as "project leader" (although I don't know where Snowblizz sees himself ) but it'd be good to get some feedback from the other side of the fence as well.