[CMake-Promote] recruiting people

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Alexander Neundorf wrote:

>>Von: "Brandon J. Van Every" <bvanevery at gmail.com> 
>> 
>>I was randomly Googling around, actually trying to find out about web  
>>statistics that might already track CMake, when I ran into someone's  
>>list of tools on their homepage.  http://math.lbl.gov/~deschamp/  Since  
>>they had made mention of CMake, to the point of having a 
>>    
>>
>CMakeBanner.jpg  
>  
>
>>on their webpage, I thought I would e-mail this person and see if he  
>>wanted to join CMake-Promote.  I think this is a drill that can be  
>>readily repeated: Google around for people who are already listing 
>>    
>>
>CMake  
>  
>
>>among their (presumably preferred) tools, and then contact them to see  
>>what resources or energies they might have available. 
>>    
>>
> 
>This should be done by one person 
>

That's not a reasonable way to proceed.  It denies us any multiplicative 
scaling effect, and no one person has the time to do the entire job.  
Just that one contact I tried to make took me 20 minutes of futzing, 
because none of his e-mail addresses worked.  Multiply that out and 
you'll see that no one person is going to get very far with this.  You 
can probably measure it in "hours spent per successful recruit."

>or at least it has to be done 
>coordinated. It would suck if the same person would receive several 
>emails with the same topic from different people. 
> 
>
I'm not so sure it would suck.  My presumption is that we're sending 
customized letters relevant to the individual's circumstances, not 
spamming them with form letters.  If a person received 2 different 
invites from 2 different people to the same mailing list, that just 
strikes me as positive reinforcement.  Also, we don't all travel in the 
same circles, so I think the actual odds of contacting the same people 
is lower than one might guess.

For this problem, I think it is more important that we all do something, 
rather than make rules about why we cannot do something.  If we were 
actually recruiting a bunch of people, and double invites were being 
complained about, then we'd know we actually had a problem and we could 
adjust for it.  Needed adjustments might be far short of a MUTEX 
coordination system, like just apologizing at the beginning of the 
invite if it's redundant to someone else's.

Finally I don't think the alternative, which is keeping a mailng list of 
people we've tried to contact, is preferrable.  Makes our behavior look 
more like spamming, gives people a case of the privacy / security heebie 
jeebies.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every
Taking risk where others will not.