Some years ago I tried to motivate people to contribute to Perl 6, and found that while many had some lingering interest in doing so, they needed some steering.
This was hard for me to do, because usually in Open Source communities, you aren't supposed to tell people what to do; they are free to chose the occupation after all. But I found that it worked very well.
So I think the CPAN Pull Request Challenge is a very good approach to steer people to particular projects, without causing too much work for those who steer. At least it's a very good experiment to try.
I find it pretty fun to try to modify code that lives in a world that I'm largely not part of, this is a nice little impetus!
I guess I'd rather invest in the future rather than try to save the past.
As far as I know, only the Lisp community has something similar to cpantesters in their cl-test-grid project.
On the other hand nowadays a language community could probably set up something similar to cpantesters using travis so hopefully we'll see more of those sort of systems in the future.
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[1] - If you want to play buzzword bingo you can think about cpantesters as a distributed, fault-tolerant, self-organizing, volunteered run, cross-platform continuous integration platform that is free to end-users.
Does anyone know of any other langs/communities that have tried something like this? This seems like a great idea to learn and contribute.
CTAN for TeX, CCAN for C, forgot the ruby name, LISP has it even with a cpantesters alike testers grid, PHP split it into PECL for binary extensions (higher quality) and PEAR, which struggles. emacs lisp, node.js, ocaml, ...
go uses git only for their distributed module system, which is a nice and simple idea, (github as default) but also appeared in common lisp before.
http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl_2014/
It works best with at least six months practical experience in any programming language.
It might be possible to help with e.g., documentation (which could also be taken as an opportunity to learn just enough Perl to read less-documented code).
In general though it would be cool to just automate this in some fashion. Occasionally email participants a link to projects that haven't had commits in many months but have open bugs or feature requests.
Many CPAN modules are blobs of arcanery and some work completely well but are relatively abandoned.
I get the impression this CPAN campaign is an attempt to introduce, or reintroduce, folks to Perl, which might not be as big of a problem with Ruby. That is, of course, my opinion.
Seems like it shouldn't be limited to CPAN modules.
