Talking people into submitting patches #

In November I am going to attend Apache Con NA. This year I decided to do a little experiment: I sumitted a talk on talking people into contributing to free software projects. The format of the talk is a bit unusual: Drawing from my - admittedly limited and very biased - experience explaining free software to others and talking people into contributing patches this talks tries to initiate a discussion on methods to get awesome developers to consider contributing their work back to free software projects.

As a precursor to the talk I have created a public Google docs document - it already contains the title of each slide I will use in my presentation. Of course the content does not get disclosed ahead of time.

If any of the readers of this blog post has experience with either explaining why they contribute, how to contribute, issues and questions new users have - please feel free to fill them into above document. I’ll try to integrate as much feedback as possible into my final slides.