First Timers Only: on helping people contribute to open source
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Should we incentivise open source contributions more?
"You use feature FOO a lot! You're probably an expert, have you considered helping with FOO issue triage on our bug tracker [link]?"
Encouraging power users to contribute back could certainly help when communities grow.
Open source is sometimes simply groups of people helping each other out because they asked nicely.
Dealing with merge conflicts is an important skill that I've seen many experienced developers struggle with.
My experience might be biased from helping teams migrate from svn to git, but I've seen problems with all VCS.