question for board members

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Fri, May 07, 2010 at 08:55:12 -0500,
  inode0 <inode0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I very strongly agree with this observation Mike. The vast majority of
> users probably just want to be users but they can be swept up with
> enthusiasm about contributing and in the end most consume resources
> from other contributors while trying to get started and then
> disappear. It is sad to see people who express interest and some
> effort leave, it is really sad to add up the opportunity cost that the
> project suffers in that process.
> 
> Seeing massive startup failure among new contributors is one reason I
> think the project  should focus more on targeting contributors
> directly, rather than hoping to siphon them off from an increase in
> the user base. I see potential users and potential contributors as
> largely disjoint sets at this point. There are reasons to target both
> audiences, but I think they need to be treated as different target
> audiences.

Maybe we should try to collect exit interviews and find out why people
give up?

We also might not be doing a good job of explaining minimum time (or other)
commitments up front.

It is easy to sucked into more stuff. That has been pretty much my entire
experince with Fedora for about the last 1.5 years. (I had wanted to do
some packaging before that, but that's when I got sucked in.) At this point
I need to be very careful, as I have a number of things I want to work on
(and other things I see need doing) and my time is pretty close to maxed out.