State of Pidgin: Attracting and Maintaining New Contributors

[David Woodhouse]

On Tue, 2017-10-03 at 10:11 -0500, Gary Kramlich wrote:
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean by adoption here.  I'll assume you mean
> entry to contribute and leave it at that.

Indeed. But let's set aside the VC discussion completely. I didn't want
Matěj to get shouted down unanimously, but it doesn't look like there's
actually much point in us tilting at that windmill.

> That said we have much bigger problems than that right now.  We don't
> need a million drive by contributions that people aren't going to see
> all the way through.  We need people that are going to stick through
> the entire pull request process and hopefully continue to be involved
> in the project.

Those drive-by contributions are where *everyone* starts. Those are the
seeds from which everything else grows.

We need them, but we *also* need to focus on the "conversation rate" —
where we convert the drive-by contributors who just wanted to scratch
their own itch, into repeat contributors and members of the community.

Maybe we're just saying the same thing in different words, but your
focus seemed to be slightly disparaging towards the one-off
contributor. We need to *encourage* those and then encourage them to
stay, not say "you stick around and become a long-term maintainer, or
we're not interested". Which is how I (perhaps mis-)interpret your
choice of words.
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