[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] hobbyist recruiting

[Jason Cooper]

All,

During the proposal period for last year's KS, there was quite a bit of
talk regarding maintainer survivorship.  imho, the best solution
involves continuously bringing in new maintainers and developers as they
crop up.  Should we encounter the unfortunate situation of needing to
find a replacement, having plenty of pre-trained developers on hand
gives us more flexibility.

As a hobbyist, I of course think the answer is recruiting more hobbyists
into the ranks :)

Unfortunately, we ran out of time during the lightning round last year
for me to give a short presentation on the topic of hobbyist recruiting.

I'm not a fan of reaching out in the direct sense.  I much prefer to
keep my eye out for new comers who seek out the community and make sure
they don't get ignored.  I know a lot of us have pretty aggressive mail
filtering out of necessity.  For those interested in assisting me, I'd
like to discuss creating some basic resources to facilitate spotting new
comers and directing them as appropriate.

Something as simple as creating a separate mailbox and ruleset for
senders we haven't seen before (with a few keywords to filter out the
spam) would help greatly.

On a related topic, I've also started receiving patches from first time
contributors who are taking part in the Eudyptula Challenge [1].  No, I
hadn't heard of it either.  It's very similar to the Matasano Crypto
Challenge [2], except that it builds up to contributing patches to the
kernel.

If this topic is accepted, I'll give a status update on the hobbyists
I've seen since the last KS, what work they've done (hint: those
Chromecasts can boot mainline now ;-), I'll also compile some rough
stats on first-time posters to the most popular email lists.  eg was it
legit, did anyone respond, did the poster return?  Currently, I'm
thinking lkml and lakml would be most relevant.  There may be other
lists I'm not aware of.  Please let me know if that's the case.

If anyone is already doing work in this area, I'd be interested in
hearing from you as well.

Nominations:

Jason Cooper		(auto-nominated)
Andrew Lunn
Sebastian Hesselbarth	(auto-nominated)

thx,

Jason.

[1] http://eudyptula-challenge.org/
[2] http://www.matasano.com/articles/crypto-challenges/