Comment by pubby
7 years ago
People are inherently selfish. Everyone is looking to better their own self-interests, seek validation, and seek attention in life. A community - any community - is made entirely of these people.
An effective leader is one who can play to the strength of this fact rather than fighting it. You have thousands of people willing to spend their time for you. How can you make their interests align with your own? How can you convince them that your self-interest is their self-interest?
Funny, but I don't think calling people entitled is the answer to this.
I maintain a few open source projects that many developers use (along with many more projects that no one uses) and I get like one PR a month. It seems like some developer’s entire workflows depend on some of the tools and libs I maintain, but I don’t even use the damn things myself.
That seems like the perfect case for self interest: make this thing you use all the time work better for you. The code is usually fairly clean and the contribution process documented. And yet all the help wanted issues just sit there.
How have other maintainers been able to encourage more valuable community contributions?