I think the success of events are clear. We have a SymfonyCon with two interesting presentations, “How to pitch Symfony to your client” and “Community Building with Mentoring: What makes people crazy happy to work on an open source project?”. By these two at least you may know two intentions from @fabpot. First one is to help people like you and me to really get Symfony2 out there and nail clients/contracts thereby helping you in your work and to succeed. You succeed, Symfony succeeds. Smart move. The second one is looking forward to the community and caring about breeding the right type of community efforts.
Drupal is an example to study as they have many years of organizing and experimenting with what works and how it works on the FOSS field. Cathy They’s slides https://github.com/YesCT/warsaw set us in a good direction to be concerned about a community growth path a human roadmap. So far Symfony has been a community of top experts working on cool stuff, but with popularity and growth we have to take care of quality and a contributor culture. Symfony without a contributing community cannot thrive as Drupal does. Drupal has success because is indeed a well networked community. Symfony is getting there, but there is the danger of breeding things we don’t necessarily want as a community, namely bad quality and uncontrolled growth.
Mentoring is one of the answers but it is also hard on some people. I myself was mentored by several people along the road, it is not easy and a continuous thing, and it is hard. I think is good we learn in a challenging environment but it costs a lot of time and will. Mentoring helps a lot to easy that path. This saturday, that is tomorrow, we are going to see if we put things into practice. If you are not clear on what a hacking day looks likes please follow the guidance that we will give and have been giving along.
I think @fabpot did good in bringing this talks on board for the conference. But definitely it is not going to be an easy path, and it will take work not just from him but from the community. We have to raise the bar ultimately. How do we raise the bar and at the same time teach people and at the same time fit this into people business mindset and schedules?
My practical advice, get into code within your team, be ready, read issues, read and try. Meet people now at Warsaw that can help, or whom you can ask for help while you code. Don’t wait until the last minute, read tickets and then bring up questions from your findings. A larger community is rising.
I hope you will be with us this saturday.
Encouragements in all good, your friend
@cordoval