Re: Question on community to the candidates.

[Alexandre Franke <alexandre franke gmail com>]

Hi,

On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 6:16 AM, Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me> wrote:
> It is my impression (and I state impression because I am providing no
> data) that GNOME has more reliance on people paid to work on GNOME
> than community.  I do not question the passion and dedication to those
> who are paid on GNOME, I know that they would do it as a community
> even if they were not paid.

It is my impression (and I state impression because I am providing no
data) that most people who do get paid to work on GNOME have been
hired exactly because they were part of the community.

> If you agree with my impression, what actions do you think would help
> increase participation in GNOME?  Participation in the core parts of
> GNOME is not trivial, and requires an enormous amount of time and
> dedication to get to become familiar with the huge codebase that we
> have, as well as gain the trust of the maintainer of the module you
> are interested in.

Following my previous statement, I think people get involved first and
then get hired to continue working on what they were already working
on (or something close). Therefore I don't think that the "enormous
amount of time and dedication" is that difficult to overcome. Of
course that doesn't mean there's no room for improvement, and I'm
happy that we had such events as the DX hackfests. I think we should
have more of them and I'd certainly vote in favour if there were
requests for budget to hold them.

> If you disagree with my impression, what makes you believe that it is
> not the case? How would you change my mind?  I did not bring any data
> points, so you don't have to either.  I'm more interested in giving
> you a biased opinion and I want to know how you would react to it.

I hope my reply will satisfy you. I'd like to add that I think it's a
good thing that people manage to make a living working on our project,
and that I actually wish there were more companies hiring them. I
don't know how to solve this issue though.

-- 
Alexandre Franke