From Tom's messages, I don't see him discouraging active outreach to new contributors. I think we all agree that the core question is how to get more developer engagement in discussions and recurring contributions.
Last year, I interviewed six developers on their experience, the summary of my conversation is here User Interviews Results Part 3: Cultivating a Thriving Developer and Trainer Community. From those conversation they suggested:
- better visibility on the long-term roadmap
- continuing to provide individual support when they asked for help on the mailing list and monthly developers' calls.
- The communication can be harsh and off-putting when there is disagreement (like in the last few messages in this thread). They also believe that to contribute to the project in the long term, one needs to be persistent and tenacious.
From my experience, contributors with less experience with open-source tacit rules need nudges and encouragement to take responsibility. We already have clear guidelines on how one can contribute, what we are missing is continuous outreach and engagement with new contributors. This task usually requires a community manager, which we currently lack, and it isn’t my personal strength. However, I believe that part of it can be automated.
At one point, NumPy posted a welcome message after merging the first pull request from a new contributor. We can also send a similar message when assigning an issue to a contributor for the first time or when they open their pull request. Our welcome message can encourage the contributors to read the relevant documentation and introduce themselves on the forum.
I see no issue with automating this process using a GitHub action (see GitHub - behaviorbot/welcome: A probot app that welcome new users for an example). We can implement it when:
- A contributor opens their first PR with an invitation to introduce themself on the forum and read contribution guideline
- We merge their first PR with a congratulation an invitation to look at issues titled "help-wanted" or "Difficulty: Up for grabs."
After a few PRs are merged, contributors need to know how they can gain more responsibility and rights in the repo. This process is currently not transparent and is part of a separate governance discussion.