Neary: Curing "Shy Developer Syndrome"

On his blog, Dave Neary has some suggestions on helping developers get more comfortable with interacting in public forums like those typically used by free software projects. He points out a number of barriers that some developers face when considering participating in a mailing list along with some ideas on how to surmount them. "In community projects, peer review is expected — in fact, it is a best practice, one of the things that separates successful community projects from the crowd. Developers expect to hear about features before they are developed, and have an opportunity to suggest better ways the feature can be implemented. They expect new contributors to submit patches that they can review — it is the way a new contributor builds trust before getting the keys to the house. It is such a recommended practice that the only treatment I can suggest is that you should help your developers to get over their nervousness & embrace peer review, by making it the norm in your team." (Thanks to Paul Wise.)

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