As S.P.Zeidler noted, piling more work onto project admins doesn’t sound very attractive to an already busy admin. I listed some ideas on technical supports to make it easier for OS projects to get moving, and to make it easier for other contributors to get involved without the say-so of people already on the project. I bet there are plenty of other ones that don’t make admins’ lives more stressful.

What you’re proposing involves things that aren’t fun – which are usually the first things to fall off the table when time constraints kick in.

Aren’t fun for some people. Are everything to others.

It doesn’t just have to be something you naturally prefer to coding though. Helping others can be very rewarding in itself, even without the longer-term payoffs. If you don’t find it that way then maybe you are doing it wrong.

Thanks,

James

Erigami, up-thread, said:
[...]
and implied that “asking hobbyist developers to do more work” was unreasonable.

My take is, if someone has almost every privilege that society can give them, then it’s not unreasonable to ask them to take a little time out of their privileged lives to think of others. In fact, they are the very people who have the most time and resources to do it.

I didn’t say it was unreasonable. But I think the proposal is unlikely to succeed: it seems that coders contribute to open source projects for the fun of programming or because they want to have a specific app. And they do it in their spare time. What you’re proposing involves things that aren’t fun – which are usually the first things to fall off the table when time constraints kick in.

I think the largely unstated assumption that all of the smart people who have anything to contribute to Open Source are already contributing

…or have already attempted to contribute and been run off by arses.

A privilege I’m missing sorely is more than 24 hours in a day :7 (Don’t we all?)

For those people in volunteer-based open source project leadership positions I know, ‘more work’ is infeasible, the best they could do would be to spend the time they are spending differently, and since they tend to be in leadership positions because they do the tedious stuff that Needs Doing ™, I doubt that would be helpful.
You don’t necessarily need the leaders to mentor either, other senior contributors can (and IME do) very well pick up newbies that want to work on their area of interest and foster them. But pushing too hard for volunteers to take on additional jobs has its dangers: either they see the point and add the load, then overtax themselves and burn out, or it stops being rewarding for them, and you lose them as well.
It’s a fragile balance between enough encouragement and driving them away.

Premise: Open Source development has incredibly low barriers to entry[1]
Premise: Open Source development is a meritocracy
Conclusion: Open Source already has the best possible pool of contributors, because anyone who doesn’t contribute already can’t have been deterred by the non-existent barriers to entry, so they must not have sufficient merit.

Some of the comments thread (see Skud in reply to spz) has already touched on the fallacy of the first premise and in fact as per Skud’s post the failure of the two premises is in fact related: the false assumption of a meritocracy is in fact one of the barriers to entry.

I think the largely unstated assumption that all of the smart people who have anything to contribute to Open Source are already contributing, or at least will spontaneously involve themselves from a young age, is pervasive and harmful and very closely connected to this post. I’m reminded also of the point from If you thought Physics was misogynistic, try open source software!:

On a side note: it’s interesting to me how many subcultures like to congratulate themselves for being of above average intelligence… In physics and in software development, it’s worse, for there everybody in the community is convinced that only the most intelligent are able to get into that community at all. They are convinced not only that are they smarter than everybody else, but they’re all really out there on the extreme tails of the distribution, and that nobody not on those extreme tails is capable of making a contribution.

Which is not to say that I believe even the extreme tail of ‘intelligence’ (yeah, problematic construct already) has signed itself up for Open Source development, but the meritocratic myth interacts with this “only extreme talent need apply” myth too.

[1] For coding the barriers to entry are usually cited as “just” a computer to which you have access for extended periods of time, on which you have the ability to install compilers, interpreters and/or libraries, plus access to reference materials of some kind. Even without reference to privilege I could add a bunch of others, but it’s not the point of this comment.

Erigami, up-thread, said:

The solution you propose involves folks in OS projects spending even more time helping out others, which requires a great deal of privilege.

and implied that “asking hobbyist developers to do more work” was unreasonable.

My take is, if someone has almost every privilege that society can give them, then it’s not unreasonable to ask them to take a little time out of their privileged lives to think of others. In fact, they are the very people who have the most time and resources to do it.