Bounty Program finished - a short review

[Guilherme Salgado]

Hi,

So, I'm a new contributor who started looking for some easy bugs to
fix about 4 weeks before the bounty program finished. I looked around
the wiki/mailing lists but didn't find anything about it, so maybe
indeed it could be better advertised.

However, I think providing a bounty as an incentive for people to make
their first contribution is not the best way to grow a community[1].
What I think is most important is to have an ongoing process to make
sure anybody who shows up (on IRC, mailing lists or bugzilla) willing
to contribute gets some attention and timely feedback (making them
feel welcome is also great)[2]. That is important because the person
certainly has a momentum built when they first get in touch, and if
they don't get attention (help, feedback, whatever) in a timely
fashion, they're likely to lose that momentum and could very well be
engaged into something else when the feedback comes. I may be biased
because this is more or less what happened to me: even though I got
some feedback (in the form of "your patch looks ok, but I haven't
looked closely") on my first patch, both patches I proposed are in
bugzilla and have been there for at least 3 weeks with no feedback,
and one of them was even worth a bounty (which I don't intend to claim
as I proposed it a day before the deadline). I understand most (if not
all) of the developers here are volunteers, which makes it difficult
to have somebody always available on IRC, or provide some form of SLA
on patch reviews, but I think you stand a much better chance of making
new contributors stick around even if you have just a best-effort
process to ensure new contributors feel welcome and get help/feedback
in a timely fashion.

PS: Note that I never felt unwelcome by the developers or thought my
time was wasted, but I think there's room for improvement if you want
to make new contributors feel welcome and stick around

[1] I could go into more detail about why I believe that, but given
the result of the bounty program it's probably not worthwhile
[2] As an example, Ubuntu has a program they call Patch Pilot
(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment/CodeReviews#Patch_Pilots),
which is a process that ensures there's always somebody available to
help new contributors, and it also describes how to deal with patches
from those new contributors.


On 5 August 2013 15:52, Christian Stimming <christian at cstimming.de> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> we've been running a Bounty Program [1] over the last two months here in
> GnuCash. It is now finished. Thanks for everyone who had a look!
>
> In general, the open tasks have been worked on quite successfully: All
> Bugzilla tasks are completed (though two of them turned out to be fixed or
> non-reproducible or both). From the Uservoice request list, two new features
> have been completed as well, though eight other tasks were left open. [2] In
> that sense, the program was mainly successful.
>
> However, the program unfortunately did not attract the attention of any
> developer who wasn't already active within gnucash. This was one particular
> goal of this project, and in my opinion the bounty amount was significant
> enough for this. But as everyone here probably noticed: There were no
> questions from any newcomer regarding any of the tasks of the program
> whatsoever. This is unfortunately not what I had expected. Did we do too
> little announcements? Are there websites or places around where more
> interested people would have picked up the news? I don't know. I asked
> beforehand to run this as an experiment, and we now have the result: A program
> of this kind does not really help in attracting new developers. Well, a
> result, too.
>
> In any case thanks everyone! With our new releases the project is also
> progressing strongly towards the next stable release. Keep up the good work!
>
> Best Regards,
>
> CHristian
>
>
> [1] http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Bounty_Program
> [2] https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2013-July/035880.html
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