[kde-community] Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is.....

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Thursday 11 September 2014 15:56:01 Arjun Ak wrote:
> How about having something similar to the eudyptula challenge
> (http://eudyptula-challenge.org/) ?

Please don't take this personally, Arjun, but the challenge you linked to 
serves as the ideal example of how we should _not_ do this ;)

Its underlying assumption seems to be "if we raise the barrier of entry as 
high as possible, we only get the really good people", so they did what they 
could to frighten people off by
- Allowing email as the only way of communication
- Telling people that HTML mails will be rejected
- Explicitly prohibiting people to ask questions
- Using quite harsh words to describe those limitations

This is the antithesis of welcoming inexperienced, insecure people who would 
like to give back to the community that produced software they love, but don't 
know how.

If there is one thing which the VDG taught us, it's that we should do the 
exact opposite of what the Eudyptula Challenge does: We should lower the 
barrier as far as possible, we should offer people help and advice wherever we 
can, we should ease their minds and help them to overcome their insecurities.
Many new contributors in the VDG forum introduce themselves with "I'm not a 
designer, but...", and then they often present brilliant ideas, which are 
sometimes just be scribbled on a piece of paper due to lack of knowledge of 
using graphics software, but can easily be taken up and refined by the 
community to the point where they are clear enough to be implemented.

And people in the forum learn along the way, from each other. They learn how 
to use graphics applications, and some even take a stab at QML in order to 
help their ideas become a reality. 

The VDG showed us is that attracting people willing to help us out and 
motivating them to stick around and grow as they go along is more important 
than "securing top talent" by raising the barrier. So yes, we need to put 
quite some effort into this, but I'm sure it will pay out in the end.

Cheers,
Thomas