[CREATE] LGM11 panel proposal: attracting new devs

[Alexandre Prokoudine]

On 2/19/11, Yuval Levy wrote:

> For the past four years Hugin had an good flow of contributors - developers,
> builders, translators, documenters, designers.
>
> Most coders come, implement one or two nice features, and go.  I would
> estimate 50% are Google Summer of Code students and 50% come "out of the
> blue" with an entry on the Tracker such as [0] or [1].  Many (if not most) of them
> are not very active in the (users) community and I assume the motivation is
> "scratch your own itches".

It's quite the same with Inkscape, except that some of the students
stick and continue working past their projects. But GSoC has really
been giving us 50% of new stuff in final releases.

I won't quote the rest of your reply, because I simply agree :)

However I'm strongly against the idea of getting just developers
involved. There's heaps of work to do in the usability and design
department wherever you look. GIMP team has been benefitting from work
with Peter Sikking for some years now, Krita team worked with him as
well a year ago, Scribus team reportedly has an interested usability
engineer since recently, but most other projects are on their tod. IMO
it needs full attention. We can't just pile new code on top of other
code and get away with that.

Alexandre Prokoudine
http://libregraphicsworld.org