Item — HN Reader

So if you start a project and send email to a bunch of folks and ask them to just jump in and contribute, which group do you think will get going more quickly?

This article is predicated on the premise that most open source projects actively recruit strangers to work on them. This has not been the case for any open source projects that I have worked on. Instead, I normally address my own needs by contributing to open source. I assume most others first participate in a similar manner, so I think the article is built on a faulty premise.

4 comments

Not necessarily faulty, just non-universal. She seems to be speaking from her experience with Mozilla, which does actively recruit strangers. I think large projects are always looking for contributors.

Your answer is predicated on the premise that all possible contributors to open source projects are comfortable with the habits and processes of a low context culture just like you are. If anything, your example strengthens the argument of the article, you are comfortable walking up to someone you have never been introduced to wearing weird clothes, ah, sorry, writing code that doesn't do what you want and tell them how to change it.

It is exaclty the point of the article that open source projects are more attractive to people like you and that people who don't behave like that have a harder time joining.

There's a difference between fixing a bug because it's getting in your way and helping somebody out with their project. Fixing a bug in code you're running on your own computer is not like walking up to someone and criticizing their clothes. It's like sewing up a hole in your own clothes.

Of course, the actual action of fixing the bug is the same in both cases. It's just a difference in how you see it.

For cases like that — where someone makes a change to some open-source software for their own purposes, not in order to help out the project — the question is not how to "recruit" them, but how to make sure that they can make those changes easily, and then how to induce them to share the changes. Stormy's point about different cultures needing different approaches still holds in that case, but they'll be different different approaches.

It sounds to me like the author is indicating that people with the "high-context" don't just jump in. If they make their own changes to the code, presumably they'd not attempt to get them merged (due to distrust of others or distrust of self?). They need a soft and gradual introduction into the development community and the group of people that work on the project regularly before they feel comfortable enough to submit patches and interact in otherwise meaningful ways.

That's what I took from the article. It's an interesting problem.

Not necessarily. Your example does not refute the premise. You would have to give an example where people contribute a project of yours, not the opposite. I.e. because you contribute in a certain way to a project voluntarily, it doesn't mean that that same project doesn't live by a low context culture fashion.

I've thought about this many times. I see many people with programming skills far greater than mine submitting code to many open source projects, but if I need someone to jump in a form a team with me and I will indeed choose somebody I know personally, even if it's a person with lower technical skills than me.