Boosting community engagement with CPAN

By Neil Bowers (‎NEILB‎) from ThamesValley.pm
Date: Saturday, 12 December 2015 11:30
Duration: 20 minutes
Target audience: Any
Language: English
Tags: community cpan github

The CPAN Pull Request Challenge has been running since January of this year. Participants are assigned a different CPAN distribution each month, and have a month to submit at least one pull request.

My original goal was to get some bugs fixed and older distributions updated to follow recent CPAN conventions. But many more people signed up than I was expecting, and as a result some of the goals and my motivation changed.

While retaining the original goals, it has become more about how to get people involved in "the CPAN community", and participants helping each other to improve how they develop, test and release their CPAN distributions.

In this talk I'll cover how the challenge evolved and give some stats showing the impact it's had on CPAN this year. I'll talk about why people signed up, and why they dropped out, and what both of those mean if we want to try and engage people, particularly beginners, in open source communities.