[sugar] New developers... how to place them?

[Mike C. Fletcher]

As I start the developer outreach work I'm getting (quite a few) 
developers asking me the question:

    Where should I work within the project.

and I'm coming up against the question of how I can know what the 
project priorities/needs are.  Over time I will hopefully become 
pseudo-omniscient (work on that later ;) ) but in the meantime I'm 
tossing around some ideas.

So far my answers are of the character:

    * We desperately need documentation
          o Mel is beginning work on that with Marco now
    * We desperately need (documented) sample code for:
          o Hippo, particularly for activities, particularly more
            advanced layouts showing both how and *why*
          o Telepathy, we need sample code for "how to share activity
            state among multiple participants"
          o Hardware access from Python (for all special hardware)

and I *think* those answers are probably the right answers *today* (and 
there's more in the wiki on the developer's images pages), but that's 
all just *me* thinking up what needs to be done.  What I need to be 
effective is requests from the various project leads, things like:

    * We need someone to build an X activity with an associated set of
      simple experiments
    * We need someone to document X API(s) or processes
    * We need someone to figure out how to do X
    * We need someone to run X subproject, they need to be able to do
      this, that and the other thing

If at all possible, some prioritisation would be helpful (is this 
blocking your project, going to speed it up, or just a nicety).  I'll 
probably look into getting such things posted to a wiki page somewhere 
(or maybe something with an RSS feed).

Or does someone have a better idea?  Project-wide ticket-tracker for 
"hiring"?  Simple mailing list with announces of needs and offers?

There are thousands of developers willing to work, where do we need them 
tomorrow,
Mike

-- 
________________________________________________
  Mike C. Fletcher
  Designer, VR Plumber, Coder
  http://www.vrplumber.com
  http://blog.vrplumber.com