We are seeking input from the community for ideas on ways to increase engagement in Eclipse IDE projects. In the past we used to conduct demo camps around the world, coding camps / hackathons, host webinars on key topics, etc.
Share your ideas on how to increase involvement and engagement in Eclipse IDE projects.
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I see three main obstacles we could address for newcomers to become contributors in the IDE space.
On-boarding
By this I mean the initial work a newcomer has to do to become a contributor: it includes technical setup, but also documentation on process (what is expected of me as a contributor, who do I talk to? Where do I start? I'm glad to say things are improving in this area: the move to GitHub, for example, but also "Contributing.md" being updated, etc. The litmus test here is: can I get from no knowledge to opening a PR without talking to anyone? We need to bet better at maintaining this on-ramp for new contributors (and no, I'm not volunteering to do all of it: either we all take responsibility, or it's doomed to fail).
Community
Just like there is technical on-boarding, there's also community on-boarding. Right now, it's even difficult to find out even which mailing lists to follow if I'm contributing to a particular project. I would suggest that an old-timer write an article "how to contribute to Eclipse IDE" that project's "contributing.md" can refer to.
We need to have technical conversations in the open: I would start a community call in the project, where community members can bring their topics and project leadership can relate stuff like cross-project issues, etc.
Vision
People get involved with an open source project because they enjoy participating or because they expect an advantage out of their involvement. In the first case, we need to tell them why they should be excited to participate, in the second we need to show folks (and businesses) how the can profit from becoming involved in the IDE project.
Many of the companies and individuals in the IDE project have been around for a long time. If we want to attract new contributors, we need to give them new reasons for participating (or they would have, already).
Call me a pessimist, but "maintain a slowly dying product" is not the motto that will attract new contributors. So we need to show how the Eclipse IDE and it's constituent project will evolve to stay relevant.
For this, I would call a stakeholder summit (for each project, but also for the overall project) where all the relevant parties can hammer out what they expect out of the IDE project and what they're willing to invest. This should yield a "mission statement" that could excite new participants.
IMO 1. and 2. can be solved at the tactical level, but it's important that the folks holing the purse strings (managers) value community enablement task on the same level as bug fixes and features.
The third one is really where it counts, IMO. If we can't find a vision for the future, a slow decline is inevitable. When we started the Eclipse project 20 years ago, our goal jokingly was "total world domination". I am convinced it can be again.
Firstly thank you for this great feedback.
Regarding point 1.
We have taken this on board in the Eclipse IDE Working Group and we will look at generating some detailed step by step instructions that we hope to be able to use as a basis for all projects. We will look to harness the work that you have already done for JDT. So there is a concrete action point to move this forwards.
Regarding point 2, we also agree. We hope to use the new website URL: https://www.eclipseide.org/ as a hub for this kind of information.
Regarding point 3 - this is very valid and we will discuss this further in the coming weeks. We agree with you that we need a more aggressive future vision for the IDE.
I don't believe the reasons why Eclipse IDE has less contributors that $NAME_A_COMPETITOR or $N_YEARS_AGO are "how to contribute" because most project do maintain some documentation; also I don't believe that it's hard to get in touch with the community as more and more projects do use GitHub issues and users just open there questions there like they do for any other project. IMO, most Eclipse projects are in a good state regarding on-boarding or are making substantial efforts towards making on-boading easier, without need of Working Group intervention.
Maybe the working group could help a few of the reluctant projects to move to GitHub and write a decent CONTRIBUTING.md but it's not what would be more profitable given the Working Group expertise (which is more on strategy and management and marketing and resource sharing... than on technical and community aspects, where committers are usually doing good work).
The first questions to answer in order to "increase engagement in Eclipse IDE projects" -where strategy and marketing can be involved and thus where committers may not be good at- are IMO "why should I contribute to Eclipse IDE?" and "(what) can I contribute to Eclipse IDE?". Once someone has a good answer to those, they can then come to GitHub, open their tickets and everything becomes business as usual, committers know how to best take care of the next steps; but as long as those preliminary questions have no answers, people just won't contribute without a reason to do so.
IMO, the Working Group would be best at building good answers to those questions and making them advertised on the main IDE & download page; with a link to GitHub projects.