coapp-developers team mailing list archive

[Garrett Serack <garretts@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey folks,

(not an official announcement yet!)

We're reaching a stage in the CoApp project where we can really use the help of Windows developers to assist us in shallow forking open source projects as a precursor to producing actual CoApp packages for products and libraries.

I have an idea to encourage developers to assist us--it involves running a contest:

To encourage OSS community developers shallow-fork and create Windows builds of OSS projects, according to the procedure (http://fearthecowboy.com/2011/05/09/shallow-forking-a-project/) .

Each project worth between one and five points, depending on complexity and importance (decided by, um... me!) and we go until we have 100 forked projects in github at which point we go into sudden-death overtime, where people have 7 days to get their forks done in order to count.

So we'd end up with a little more than 100 packages, and someone who worked really hard on something at close to the end wouldn't get screwed over.  Also, we wouldn't have to give anything out until we reached our goal :D

Then we draw for prizes, each point gets you one entry in the draw.

I'm thinking if we had a sizable number of prizes--Like an XBox+Kinect+games bundle at the top, and work our way down, we may be able to jumpstart the whole thing. I've already got commitment from the Outercurve Foundation and Microsoft to furnish some funds for prizes.

Plus perhaps we could get t-shirts printed up for all the people who forked something... (perhaps with some classy phrase regarding  "Forking projects for Windows" ... or "I forked for Windows")

It also occurred to me this morning that we could award points in the draw for bugs filed (reproducible, accepted bugs) as well.

My questions for you:


-       I can easily acquire prizes of products that Microsoft produces (Xboxes, Kinect, games, mice, keyboards, software) --  does anyone have any opinions as to what I should get?  I'm going to have to order the prizes before the contest completes in order to get it into this budget cycle.


-       Should I focus on as many large prizes and only a few small things, or should I get a lot of smaller/medium things, and a couple big ones?


-       Is this something that interests you all?  It'd start pretty quick (Probably as early as next week)-and will go until we get to 100 projects (+sudden death overtime!)



[Description: Description: Description: fearthecowboy]<http://fearthecowboy.com/>

Garrett Serack | Microsoft Open Source Software Developer | Microsoft Corporation
Office:(425)706-7939                                       email/messenger: garretts@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:garretts@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
blog: http://fearthecowboy.com<http://fearthecowboy.com/>                                      twitter: @fearthecowboy<http://twitter.com/fearthecowboy>

I don't make the software you use; I make the software you use better on Windows.