As time marches on and our lives become more complicated, it seems we have less and less time to devote to that free software project we started back in our idealistic youth. Rather than abandoning a good project due to lack of time, consider seeking out the assistance of other members of the free software community. With a few simple steps you can make it easy to find volunteers to help you complete your project.

A roadmap to finding volunteers

You need to start with a solid understanding of your own project before you can expect other people to help you with it. Have you thought about where you want your project to be one year from now? Think about it. Now write it down. Once you know the direction you want your project to go, you can start communicating the big picture to other people. As more people begin to understand your project’s ultimate destination it’s easier for some of them to become interested in helping you get it there. You may start receiving emails asking, “How can I help?” and when people offer to help you need to come up with a better response than, “I don’t know, what can you do?” Be prepared to reply with specific tasks that can be worked on and completed in a reasonable amount of time. You should also make sure you communicate the benefits the volunteers can expect to get from contributing to your project. It’s probably not money, but there are things of value that people can gain as free software volunteers.

If this seems like a lot of information to digest, don’t worry, this article will cover each of these topics in greater detail. By the time you finish reading you should have some pretty good ideas of how you can make your free software project more attractive to all of that untapped volunteer talent out there.

Communicating your project’s vision

You probably understand your project’s vision better than anyone else, after all it’s your project and you designed it. But what about everyone else? Can the average free software user look at your project and think, “I know what this project is about and where it wants to be a year from now”? Chances are you’ve gotten so wrapped up in writing code and releasing patches that you forgot about communicating your project’s big picture view. If people don’t know where the project is going they won’t know how to help it get there. Your project needs a vision.

If people don’t know where the project is going they won’t know how to help it get there

Now, if you are saying to yourself “I’m a coder, not a management guru”, and wondering how to tackle this vision stuff, don’t worry. Start by looking at some of the popular free software projects on the internet to get some ideas. Most of them will have an “about” section on their web site that communicates the big picture view in a mission statement. Take OpenOffice.org as an example. Their mission is “To create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format”. That one sentence sums up the goals of the entire project.

Your project may not be as monumental as OpenOffice.org, but you can still have a mission statement. Keep it short and to the point and remember that you’re not describing the state of your project as it is today, but rather where it is going to be when all the work is finished.

Say, for example, that you are working on a killer free-software recipe management system. Your project already has a nice looking web browser interface and a really powerful database back-end. But, it would be a lot better if it could read recipe files from other, proprietary recipe management software packages. The vision for this project might be summed up as “To build a powerful, free, web-based recipe management system that is able to import files from the popular proprietary recipe management programs”. Now that wasn’t too difficult was it?

Identifying goals and tasks

Creating a vision for your project is similar to deciding where to go on vacation. You might know that you want to end up on a sunny beach with a cool drink in your hand, but you still have to figure out how you’re going to get there. Do you fly or drive? If you drive, where will you stop for lunch? Do you need to book a hotel? Free software projects have similar questions that need to be addressed. To answer these questions you need to set some goals.

You might know that you want to end up on a sunny beach with a cool drink in your hand, but you still have to figure out how you’re going to get there

Start by breaking your project into its major components. For example, if your project’s vision is “to build a free, web-based recipe management system that is able to import files from the popular proprietary recipe management programs”, you could set goals as follows:

• Create an easy to understand user interface with HTML/PHP
• Build an efficient database back-end
• Write code to import recipe files from other programs

If you’ve already put some work into the project there may only be a few items that need attention. These items can be identified and recorded as specific tasks. Suppose that you are happy with the look and feel of the browser interface for your recipe manager, but it’s marked up with HTML 3.2 and really should be updated to XHTML. So the only thing preventing you from completing the goal of creating an easy to understand user interface is the fact that your HTML is outdated. Congratulations, you have just identified a task. Record this task and continue looking at the other goals to identify more tasks. Another goal you’ve stated is to be able to import recipe files from other programs. This can comprise several tasks such as the following:

• Write code to convert Meal Master file format into native file format
• Write code to convert AccuChef file format into native file format
• Write code to convert RecipeBook-XML into native file format