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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Announcing my candidacy for the presidency 7 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • > 4. I will always be enthusiastic about new volunteers, no
    > matter howmany times I hear:
    >
    > "Hi, I'd like to volunteer."
    > "Great! What would you like to do?"
    > "I don't know."
    > "How about X?"
    > "I don't want to do *that*."
    >
    > Or:
    >
    > "Hi, I'd like to volunteer to do Y."
    > "Great!" 1 month later: "Hey, how's Y going?"
    >

    Indeed. If I had a volunteer for every time I'd heard that...

    Unfortunately, it seems a lot of the time that volunteers, when asking to help out and being presented with a Yak to shave, vanish into thin air.

    Reducing barriers to entry seems to help. Audrey's approach of giving people commit bits by way of an answer has been very instructive (if somewhat chaotic) :)

    And jobs for which people can gain both notariety and beer [perl.org] seem to be particularly attractive to volunteers.

    And I thank you for the time you put in, especially from all of over here that will mostly never get the chance to meet you in person and say it.
    • > Reducing barriers to entry seems to help.

      What's seen as barriers? I'm not personally aware of, in the past 5ish years I've been working with TPF, that anyone volunteering to help has been turned away.

      > And jobs for which people can gain both notariety and beer seem to be particularly attractive to volunteers.

      There is no notariety. Not even inter-TPF White Camels! And, for all TPF-related things I've done and people and I have helped with, I have yet to get a beer for it (I did get traditional gift f
      • > What's seen as barriers? I'm not personally aware of, in the past 5ish years I've been working with TPF, that anyone volunteering to help has been turned away.

        It's true that I'm working with examples from technical projects here, but for one small example I've seen a tripling or better of small patches actually being applied to code since moving from SourceForge CVS to email-account based SVN.

        There's a couple of extra nigglies needed to get past the SourceForge permissions stuff, but even that was enou
      • And, for all TPF-related things I've done and people and I have helped with, I have yet to get a beer for it

        I tried to buy one for you on the boat at YAPC in Toronto, but then I couldn't find you (go figure--how can someone hide on a boat?). It was getting warm, so I think I gave it to Kurt.

    • Volunteers almost never work out, and you can't use their enthusiasm with a programming project like Pugs to judge their enthusiasm for something really mundane like putting tax records online or setting up a blog they won't be able to post on.

      Most of the work for TPF is really dull to most people. That's why there aren't too many people doing it.
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