[kde-community] Bikeshedding - our strength apparently *sigh*

[Michael Pyne]

On Sat, September 19, 2015 16:24:13 Eike Hein wrote:
> On 09/19/2015 02:12 PM, Myriam Schweingruber wrote:
> > Some of you wanted the mirror on Github because apparently there are
> > developers out there who are too lazy (or too dumb) to learn to use
> > new tools. Are those developers we want?
> 
> Developer recruitment should be our #1 problem for the
> next two years, and along those lines "GitHub might get
> us contributors" is by far the strongest argument that
> side's come up with.

Agreed, but yet, I'm not sure that it's really that strong. KDE is far too 
large (effectively its own ecosystem now) to rely on increased 'foot traffic' 
from new developers alone for recruiting. We would need a recruiting and 
*incubation* program of some sort, in my opinion... but we'll never get that 
without a good deal of investment of time and energy from our existing devs, 
and that is something we are perennially short of.

Even the relatively-successful GSoC program, which is subsidized in great part 
by Google Inc., requires substantial (and unseen) effort behind the scenes by 
kde.org administrators and student mentors.

With an improvement to recruiting/incubation then *maybe* increased attention 
by more active participation on Github would start to help... but on the other 
hand it could just as likely simply result in specific applications getting a 
recruiting boost from developers who'll never intend to help with KDE as a 
whole.

Regards,
 - Michael Pyne