Are you kidding? Sign me up as a volunteer polyglot programmer, then!
Although, my own eagerness to help makes me think that the problem might not be that you tried to ask for volunteers and didn’t get any, but rather that you tried to work with volunteers and something else didn’t work out.
Maybe it’s just that volunteers that will actually do any work are hard to find. Related.
Personally, I was excited about doing some LW development a couple of years ago and emailed one of the people coordinating volunteers about it. I got some instructions back but procrastinated forever on it and never ended up doing any programming at all.
I understand how that might have happened. Now that I am no longer a heroic volunteer saving my beloved website maiden, but just a potential contributor to an open source project, my motivation has dropped.
It is a strange inversion of effect. The issue list and instructions both make it easier for me to contribute, but since they reveal that the project is well organized, they also demotivate me because a well-organized project makes me feel like it doesn’t need my help. This probably reveals more about my own psychology than about effective volunteer recruitment strategies, though.
Tried.
Are you kidding? Sign me up as a volunteer polyglot programmer, then!
Although, my own eagerness to help makes me think that the problem might not be that you tried to ask for volunteers and didn’t get any, but rather that you tried to work with volunteers and something else didn’t work out.
Maybe it’s just that volunteers that will actually do any work are hard to find. Related.
Personally, I was excited about doing some LW development a couple of years ago and emailed one of the people coordinating volunteers about it. I got some instructions back but procrastinated forever on it and never ended up doing any programming at all.
I understand how that might have happened. Now that I am no longer a heroic volunteer saving my beloved website maiden, but just a potential contributor to an open source project, my motivation has dropped.
It is a strange inversion of effect. The issue list and instructions both make it easier for me to contribute, but since they reveal that the project is well organized, they also demotivate me because a well-organized project makes me feel like it doesn’t need my help. This probably reveals more about my own psychology than about effective volunteer recruitment strategies, though.
The site is open source, you should be able to just write a patch and submit it.
This would be a poor investment of time without first getting a commitment from Eliezer that he will accept said patch.
It’d get you familiar with the code base, which you’d need to be anyway if you wanted to be a volunteer contributor.
After finding the source and the issue list, I found instructions which indicate that there is, after all, non-zero engineering resources for lesswrong development. Specifically, somebody is sorting the incoming issues into “issues for which contributions are welcome” versus “issues which we want to fix ourselves”.
The path to becoming a volunteer contributor is now very clear.
Getting someone to sort a list, even on an ongoing basis, is not functionally useful if there’s nobody to take action on the sorted list.