[Incubator] Attracting Developers

[Jody Garnett]

There are also a few out reach activities you can consider:

1) make sure your blog is picked up by http://planet.osgeo.org If you like you can ask them to pick a "tag" to subscribe to, and thus control which content you shortlist for rebroadcast.
2) As for blog content try and ensure it has some good developer stories, and not only product features. As an example the posts for map guide are always fascinating and friendly (http://themapguyde.blogspot.com.au/search/label/OSGeo).
3) Promote participation from your user community. Especially around release time, where collaboration around QA represents a solid win / win for both developers and users. Indeed this is such an important risk mitigation strategy that has even shown up on the incubation checklist.

You can also try good will gestures:
1) Join a code national or city "hackathon" (for example in australia we had http://www.govhack.org ). It both promotes your software product, and gives your developers a chance to be awesome in public.
2) Join a code sprint, the OSGeo code sprints after FOSS4G are a great chance to build up relationships between projects and iron out interoperability issues
3) Volunteer free developer training, say on google hangouts. You can usually justify helping potential developers set up a build environment and building from source. That is the first (and largest) hurdle for participation in your project. 
4) Take part in google summer of code, it gives you both publicity and a captive audience to learn how to accept new developers

However the quick answer is probably the best: be amazing and have fun doing it.

Jody
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