What do folks think of regular (maybe quarterly) maintainer meet & greets where any established project has 1-2 minutes to explain the project, explain what they are wanting to do and what kind of help they would want. Ideally the audience would be people who are interested in contributing to a project with the hopes of becoming a maintainer.
I think humanizing who a prospective contributor would be working with may make it more compelling to stick with the work. Open source feels a bit daunting at first when it’s all new and it’s a bunch of strangers.
There is still the hurdle with finding those prospective folks and getting them to show up. On the other hand, we could potentially cut these videos up and hand them off to the maintainers to link to within their contributing docs? I’m not 100% sure, this is a jumping off point.
Many projects resort to their own isolated community organization. I think it would go a long way to have a first party process where a project is highlighted and explained to a broader audience. Even if for 2 minutes I think this can invigorate participation.
I think something like this is useful broadly for projects in the Django sphere; Are you imagining this as limited to projects within Django Commons, or open to established Django projects more generally?
How about a hybrid approach where maintainers’ pitch videos are published ahead of time, and then they have the option of joining an AMA type group session for potential contributors to ask follow up questions?
The quarterly pitch video can be distributed as widely as possible to reach people who might otherwise not know about the community ecosystem.
I really like the hybrid approach. Having a short video first would make it easier for people to understand what a project is about, and the AMA could then give potential contributors a chance to ask more specific questions. It could be a good way to make smaller projects more visible too.