[perlgeek]

I'm in.

Some years ago I tried to motivate people to contribute to Perl 6, and found that while many had some lingering interest in doing so, they needed some steering.

This was hard for me to do, because usually in Open Source communities, you aren't supposed to tell people what to do; they are free to chose the occupation after all. But I found that it worked very well.

So I think the CPAN Pull Request Challenge is a very good approach to steer people to particular projects, without causing too much work for those who steer. At least it's a very good experiment to try.

[emeraldd]

I'm still amazed at the number of developers who have a block around filing bugs or send out pull requests for the tools/libraries they use.

[username223]

I'm not. Especially on larger projects, new contributors usually face something between indifference and hostility. After spending weeks in mailing list battles trying to contribute to a few projects, many people conclude it's not worth their time.

[meesterdude]

This. Even mildly popular library maintainers will be indifferent or hostile for even the most agreeable PR. Sometimes its just easier to fork and run your own version for this reason, but it makes contributing back to the community difficult.

[serve_yay]

Yeah, I don't think anything has ever come of the handful of issues I've filed with open source projects over the years. It's either silence or a WONTFIX/works as expected.

[emeraldd]

That may be part of it, I don't usually worry with mailing lists. My general approach is to file a bug in the appropriate bug tracker documenting the issue I'm dealing with then if/when possible provide a patch for the problem.

* I'm a coder not a politician ;)

[sanderjd]

It is a good deal of work to put together a merge-worthy pull request, and doing so is no guarantee of its inclusion, or even consideration. Just as an anecdote, I find it increasingly hard to justify the time to turn monkey-patches we've made to Rails (and its accompanying libraries) into pull requests and maintain them against changes upstream, when they often languish without comment from anyone with commit bit. I don't believe project maintainers have any sort of duty to keep on top of random pull requests, but it's pretty easy to lose the motivation to contribute.