Fabian Fagerholm wrote: > > I agree. After all, it's voluntary to volunteer. > But it should be very clear what is expected of you, and what you are > willing to contribute. At the moment, much is expected, but the > willingness can only be observed afterwards, day by day. > > Recent discussions on this and other lists are showing signs of the > debian (and possibly the free software) community wanting to change the > way development is done. Where before we had chaos and charismatic > people hacking away into the night, we now have people striving for > orderly development of mature systems. It is time not only to become > hackers of code, but also hackers of project management, hackers of > quality assurance and hackers of user interfaces. > > But fresh ideas require new participants - only it has become so much > more difficult to get involved. Not only do you have to possess almost > cs major skills to keep up, the debian project is so large that it is > very difficult for a prospect maintainer to grasp the whole picture and > find her own place. I sense countless lurkers reading this list and > others, trying to get a glimpse of what debian is all about, and if it's > something to get involved in. I count myself as one of them. > > Think of it as getting a job at a very large company. What if you knew > nothing of the people working around you, nothing of the internal > structure of the company, nothing of what you are expected to do? There > are many able programmers and would-be-maintainers that cannot find a > place to start. > ...
Great post. I hope you do find your place to start and don't get discouraged and move on to something else. I too feel there are many trying to find a way to contribute. I don't think there's any shortcut. You have to find something bite-sized that interests you -- be it boot-floppies, translation, porting.. -- find the appropriate list and look for a place to help. The internal structure you talk about...well, there isn't any. It's all little bits that fit together pretty well, mostly. Rick --
