Recruitment Options For a Small-Scale FOSS Project?

thermian writes "I've been developing my open source project for several years now, and I've never found a solution to one fairly important issue. How can a small-scale project attract new members? My project is pretty specialist, (no URL, sorry, I can't afford to get my server nuked) and I find that while it gets a fair bit of use, most users come to my software out of a need to solve their problem, or use my tutorials to learn about the subject, and none seem inclined to stick around and help make the product better. This is a fairly serious problem for me now, because my software has recently been adopted by a university, and I'm just not in a position to manage the entire set of applications and update everything on my own. Just preparing a version for release to students has been especially hard. The open source maxim 'Many eyes make all bugs shallow' only works if those 'many eyes' are available. So do you have any suggestions as to how, and where, to find people who fancy joining open source projects?"

Suggestion

Suggestion: post your project name.

Re:Suggestion

Maybe the question was made generic so it would be of general interest? It certainly is a legitimate question for lots of projects.

Re:Suggestion

What gets me is that he's about to release it to an university and yet he manages to miss the most obvious resource yet: university personell. Unless the school lacks a CS department, there should be CS professors, CS grad students, and undergrads all available to work on the project.

No URL?

no URL, sorry, I can't afford to get my server nuked

Changing that might have been your first step. Putting your site on coral cache and posting *that* link here may have gotten you a dozen people interested in helping.

Re:No URL?

I thought sourceforge, or freshmeat provide free hosting for projects like this!

Stephan

Re:No URL?

Actually I find SourceForge to be cumbersome for development.

Google code is much easier to use.

PS: The idea of getting "highly skilled software engineers to work on your project for free" is over. Find a corporate/university sponsor and pay someone - or find a corporate/university sponsor who is willing to donate an engineers time to the project. Or be VERY patient and be happy for a small amount of progress. Many paid engineers work on projects like Linux.

Re:No URL?

How about sites like http://www.assembla.com/ [assembla.com] ?

No URL == Credibility

For some people shameless self-promotion feels very sleazy. Apart from that, not everyone looking for help on their project is going to get a story on Slashdot. His question was probably accepted because it was legit and not just an attempt to tap /. for talent.

If he would have included info about the project there would have been a dozen +5 Funny post that said: "Well for starters you could try posting on /. harharhar."

Personally I find this question interesting an I think it warrants more than "post the link".

Re:No URL == Credibility

I understand your point, but frankly, the "harhar post it on slashdot" crowd is absolutely right. The people he wants read this site, I can guarantee it, and at least a mention of the project's site would have done him some enormous good. Honestly, creating interest in something you're doing involves announcing its existence to like-minded people. What better forum than this one?

Re:No URL == Credibility

Well I've got a project I'm working right now that I'd love everyone to know the details of. It's really super.

It will be the most secure and robust thing you've ever seen. In fact it will be the BEST thing you've ever seen.

We've got it in the works right now. I've seen the early betas, and it's AWESOME.

It's sort of open-source but not really if you read the fine print. But who reads that?

This will do everything you've always wanted it to do and more. It will literally blow you away.

When we release this thing, everyone will be crapping their trousers about how cool it is and how we managed to sit on it for so long. You really will be so amazed that you will soil yourselves.

Hell YEAH! It's that awesome. Just don't ask us too many detailed questions about what it is or what it does.

Just stick around and wait for the press releases. They'll tell you how incredibly cool our new product is.

Thanks,

Steve Ballmer

Re:No URL?

First result for "carey pridgeon" [google.com] is nmod [google.com]. If this is the right project, I'm not sure why he thought we could /. Google's servers.

Re:No URL?

But without knowing what your project is, it is hard to know what you are doing wrong. Because you probably are doing something wrong if your project is generally useful but noone is willing to help. I also run an open source project (on a really slow site so no link :)) and have gotten quite a lot of code contributions from other people. Here are some tips on what I did to try and attract people. Take it with a grain of salt, I know nothing about nBody modelling.

• Presentation is everything! If you can't convey interest to a potential contributor in less than two minutes after they have visited your site for the first time, then you have lost. You need to present your project in the most favorable way possible. You need to show me why I would want to use your code, why I would want to choose your modelling package over any of the hundreds of alternatives. I found no screenshots, no API documentation or tutorials during the ten minutes i spent browsing your project. Just a lot of text. Boooring!

• In the same vein as above, you need top quality documentation. And it needs to be very visible. Preferably a front page link. One reason why the parser generator Bison is so popular is because it includes a detailed introduction to language parsing in general. So if you want your toolkit to be popular a good idea is to include an easy introduction to nBody modelling.

• Present what your project is capable of doing, or what tasks it is supposed to solve. Can i write a space flight simulator using your library? Can I write a Python wrapper? I don't know.

• If I get seriously interested in nBody modelling then I'm likely to want to contact you with questions about the code, bug reports and patches. But your email address isn't available. I know you have an issue tracker but that is no substitute for email. New people often perfer personal communication.

• One thing I noticed is that you are using CMake for building, which is cool. But most people aren't as used to CMake as to autotools and make so you need to provide explicit and complete instructions for building your project. It is little details like that that makes your project much more appealing for potential developers.

• And last (because it is not so important), use dependencies. For example, if you can use the hash table implementation in glib instead of writing your own. Then do so! You might be able to write a good hash table in less than 400 lines, but by using glib's hash table you just saved yourself from maintaining 400 extra lines of code. There are probably both particle and linear algebra packages you could depend on to make the burden of maintaining your code easier for you.

Try the University

my software has recently been adopted by a university, and I'm just not in a position to manage the entire set of applications and update everything on my own.

Why not try at the university? If they adopted your software, they might/probably are also be interested in getting it further developed.

Re:Try the University

From the GPL version 3.0 [gnu.org]

Emphasis mine... take note of the emphasis.

15. Disclaimer of Warranty.

THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND , EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.

Also from the same source:

4. Conveying Verbatim Copies.

You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice; keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code; keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and give all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program.

You may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey, and you may offer support or warranty protection for a fee.

Here is my suggestion for you. Issue a letter to the university that has adopted your project and lay out a plan for supporting your software that flows a little bit like a business plan.

Dear University,

I have recently noted that you have adopted the use of a F/OSS software program that I am the primary developer for. I would like to thank you for your choice to promote Free and Open Sourced Software and say that I am honored by your selection of my project in particular to serve your needs.

At this time, I feel that it would be appropriate to inform you that this F/OSS project, while it may accomplish all of your needs, is not considered feature complete or mature at the present time. There are a number of features which I feel would benefit your University that I have planned for the next release, but scarce time and a lack of a budget causes progress on this release to move along at a slower than desirable pace. Additionally, due to the unwarrented nature of F/OSS it is appropriate for me to caution you that your use of the software that I have developed is at your own risk (I have done my best to make this software as bulletproof as possible, but undiscovered bugs are known to exist in the most heavily tested software products).

Having said all that, I am greatly interested the opportunity that University use of my F/OSS project presents, and I would like to present a set of possibilities for consideration that would greatly improve my ability to guarantee that you have the most mature, feature-complete software possible in the months ahead.

1. *** A support agreement between the University and myself (though affiliating yourself with a proper business entity to protect your personal assets would be VERY prudent) so that I can guarantee support on any issues with the F/OSS project encountered by the University. By enlisting the services of the author before issues occur, I hope it would give you assurance that I am committed to the F/OSS program and peace of mind that things will just as intended.
2. *** A development agreement between the University and myself to produce and release features that would benefit the University.
3. *** A partnership agreement between the University and myself so that we can build a working relationship that will be mutually beneficial. Depending on the needs of the University, I could offer to mentor as many as a dozen students whose assistance could greatly accelerate the development of the maturity of the F/OSS project.

I hope you will consider these possibilities and that you remain satisfied with the utilization of my F/OSS program. I look forward to being able to work with your University to continue to develop software together with hopes of it becoming useful for other Universities throughout the country and throughout the world.

Best Regards,

*signed*

Forums.....

Every once in a while on linuxquestions.org someone will ask where they can help out. Might be a good place to start.

Recruit?

You can't really "recruit" FOSS developers. They'll join if they find your project and find it interesting enough. The best thing you can do is increase exposure. So why, when you managed to get a story posted to /., did you decide to hide what the project is? You had the perfect opportunity to expose thousands of developers to your project and you decided not to take that opportunity. Bad move.

Yes you can recruit them! I've done it.

Quite often the userbase is not aware of the programmer shortage.

If you have a user list then quite often a plea for programmers/testers will achieve results. I have done this a few times for my major project and it has always worked.

I also disagree wiht parent that you should have posted the url on slashdot. You would have been slashdotted, for sure, the chances of finding interested developers is low. Most would have just been idle browsers.

A post on your own user list is far more likely to give results since the users have a vested interest in the software and are far more likely to be open to being "recruited".

Specifics

It's really difficult to give advice without knowing the specifics. For instance, you might have luck adding a plugin system, so that the barrier to entry is low enough for more people to join in without feeling like they have to become a proper developer. But that only works for some types of application.

Spend More Time Recruiting

If your software is being adopted by a university, perhaps you could get some interest from CS students. In general, students are more likely to have both the interest and the time to work on F/OSS projects.

You may also consider adjusting the amount of time you have to devote to various tasks to increase the amount of time you spend cultivating the ecosystem. For example, if you spend 70% of your time coding, 20% managing documentation / the web site / etc., and 10% of your time with PR, answering user e-mails, reaching out to users, etc., try upping the 10% to 20% or more. Linus' coding chops were only one part of why we've all heard of Linux.

Personality, and money.

Not publicizing the project name suggests you're either guarded with the project... and if you're concerned about the bandwidth, you're probably self-hosting, which means you're probably not on SF.net, Berlios, etc... which in itself suggests you're not as open as you'd like to think you are. Also, it sounds like you want someone specifically to share the workload, but you didn't mention any form of reimbursement. Nobody who's any good will volunteer to be your employee. If you want an employee you have to pay, and if you want a partner you have to share. At first glance, it doesn't look like there's much of either going on.

Same problem

I have this exact same problem with two of my open source PHP projects. No give, all take. It's been like this for years despite my best efforts to motivate people.

I have a few developers on one project that have never really contributed anything too, I have tried several methods in motivating them but all I get is the one liner commited from them and then nothing for years.

I wish I had an answer to this problem, but I don't think there is one. Everyone is interested in the popular projects and the rest are left out.

GSoC

Get accepted into the Google Summer of Code [google.com]!

It's becoming increasingly more competitive for organizations to become accepted as the program continues to evolve, but any established project with a vibrant user community has the potential to get accepted. Once accepted, Google basically provides an incentive for students to become involved with a project's development by seeding them with a summer stipend. It's a little more involved than that, but that's the gist.

This is the first year BRL-CAD [brlcad.org] gets to participate and I can already say it's looking to be a lot of fun. It forces a project to organize, coordinate, market, and communicate more. It's a lot of work but well worth it ... and very exciting to see the increase in developer interest!

We all know what Mila Kunis would say.

This is a fairly serious problem for me now, because my software has recently been adopted by a university, and I'm just not in a position to manage the entire set of applications and update everything on my own. Just preparing a version for release to students has been especially hard.

I'm sorry to word this so aggressively, but what the hell are you doing? Open Source does not mean "I am free labor for everyone." Nor does it mean, "I am a doormat, please walk all over me."

Listen, I'm no Linux kernel developer. I'm a poetry guy who was looking for a cheap way to get my poems out in front of eyeballs back in 1994, and coincidentally the Web had just appeared. So I'm only a long-time Web geek at best. And maybe that's not the kind of experience that some would respect. But I've put out probably 100 Open Source products in that time -- 50 phpBB mods, 10 Greasemonkey scripts, 5 Movable Type plugins, and a handful of awful, awful old scripts that nobody should ever use. I'm a father of two with a full-time job, and I've have had 15 year-olds tell me they couldn't be bothered to read the readme, because their time is more valuable than my own. I've had people come to my forums, stomp their virtual feet, and demand that I support them for free in much better fashion. After all, they ask, why did I release a product if I don't intend to add their feature requests and do the installations for them?

Listen, their agendas are not your agendas. Their timetables are not your timetables. And most most MOST importantly, your job is not to be their serving wench. It's not a job at all! Get it straight in your head what you are doing this for. I can't tell you why you do it, but making yourself so stressed out that you have to post on Slashdot begging for help (but not giving out your project name, so you can be an even bigger martyr when it all goes south) IS NOT THE REASON.

You know what I do? I say yes if I can, maybe if maybe, and no if I cannot. And I mean it. Don't make it more than that. Stop feeling obligated. And if you made promises that do obligate you in ways that you cannot meet, it's not the end of the world, but get back to the table and renegotiate. If people blackmail you with statements like "I guess I need another product" or "YOU put it out there, YOU DO IT" then just put that burden right to the side. I don't get bothered that someone might uninstall the app. They're cutting their losses (their lost time) and in the process they cut my losses (of time invested in someone who cannot help himself or herself) too. If you say you cannot build a feature and someone complains, tell them to build it. Seriously. Don't be mean, don't be vindictive, don't be snide. Mean it. If you are stressed and this isn't even your paying job, then draw lines and see who comes to your side. If they don't, then it didn't really matter to them. In which case, you're free to work on what matters to you, in a way that is healthy and sane.

Real advice

I don't see anyone giving actual, useful advice here. I face similar problems with Amanda, and so far my solutions have been to lower the barriers to entry and to encourage users to increase their investment in supporting the product. I've tried to lower barriers by

• writing better developer-level documentation
• providing a list of "starter projects"
• giving talks and webinars about Amanda's internals
• rewriting parts of the application in a more accessible language (Perl)
• making myself highly available for answers and advice

I've tried to increase investment by

• prominently displaying the names of contributors in ChangeLog, NEWS, etc.
• asking users to become "official" supporters (platform experts)
• requesting testing from specific people, rather than sending blanket "everyone please test this" emails
• asking users to donate processor cycles to automatic testing (this is still in the works)

More support requests *your* problem?

My thoughts exactly. But what's more important:

This is a fairly serious problem for me now (..)

No it isn't your problem. Unless they're paying you, you are not in any way obligated to make users of your project happy. Ofcourse you try to, but any user should understand they're not the only one with questions. And if nobody helps out, you're just a single person with limited resources.

Suppose your user base where bigger. Say 100k users. Or 10 million. Could anyone still expect you to help out anyone of those users? Ofcourse not, and in that case these 10M users would be forced to help themselves (to some degree) anyway. The same goes for a university that decides to add X students to your userbase.

Probably it's more a question of why you are working on the project, and what you get from that. Set your own priorities, decide how much time you want to invest, and go from there.

May I suggest you ask the university to do some inhouse filtering of issues/questions (eg. using a local webpage / contact person), and give you a regularly updated 'top 10' list of what they consider most urgent/important.

• If you want to support the widest possible userbase, then you might work on those issues that *also* affect other users of your project.
• If you put this university first, then you could work their list from the top down.
• If you're just doing it for fun, you could cherrypick from their list whatever issue seems most interesting.

--
Do only what only you can do. -Edsger Wybe Dijkstra