lecture: Talking people into creating patches

... and submitting them ...

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"Contributing to open source projects is trivial: Make a change, create a patch, get a review and revise, have it accepted." When heavily involved with open source projects it's easy to forget what developers interested in contributing have to learn before even making the smallest first change.

"Contributing to open source projects is trivial: Make a change, create a patch, get a review and revise, have it accepted." When heavily involved with open source projects it's easy to forget what developers interested in contributing have to learn before even making the smallest first change.

The talk summarises some of the issues and questions students, long time developers, researchers have when faced with free software development. The talk touches some of the technical issues, but focuses on cultural differences of open development communities vs. corporate or even research environments.

Instead of providing pre-baked solutions to filling this gap the goal of the talk is to initiate a discussion on how to best talk your friends and colleagues into creating patches: Which strategies did work for you, which failed? Which resources do you generally use when mentoring interested peers? Where do you see most problems?

Please note that this talk heavily relies on the the audience getting active and providing their experiences as input to the session. The goal is to generate a set of recommendations of what worked and what didn't work.