KDE Quality action: looking to the future

[Tom Chance]

Tom,

On Wednesday 14 Jul 2004 21:23, Tom Albers wrote:
> But what I still do not completely understand is that you want to be a
> starting point for new contributors and on the other hand want to be
> 'emergency-rescue-team', which requires an other level of knowledge I
> think, at least I guess here lies a challenge to do this.

Not necessarily. If you think of the kinds of "emergency rescue" tasks 
mentioned, there are all kinds of things that people can contribute. You 
mentioned creating an artwork competition and helping with documentation. 
I'll add doing some simple debugging, writing a promo article, and checking 
if bugs in bugzilla still exist in the code as more examples.

And as Carlos and Michael have recently shown, just doing a few relatively 
quick, distinct tasks can be the perfect way to get into an application team.

It's not that we have these two distinct aims - helping newcomers and 
providing emergency expert help. We can hardly guarantee the developers of 
any particular KDE application that, if they come running, we can provide a 
crack team of debuggers, for example (after all, what really good programmer 
would be content just doing that?) Nor can we take complete novices and hold 
their hand as they learn C++.

Rather, we help newcomers by giving them specific tasks to do by giving them 
the documentation, support and communication channels to enable them to do 
the work. For some, we may act as a gateway into becoming a KDE developer. 
For others, we may act as a preferable way to contribute to KDE (myself 
included). Most importantly, we try to offer a way of participating in KDE 
for as many people as possible.

At least that's the way I see it :-)

Regards,
Tom