SO's Open Source advertisement initiative is great, but I've been thinking the ads featured should be more concrete in terms of what kind of contributors they are looking for.
Usually, they concentrate on describing what a project is, but not what it needs from the SO developer community.
Also, the Open Source ads are not tag sensitive (as far as I know). They will be displayed no matter whether the user viewing them matches the required skill set or not!
I personally would feel a lot more called upon by an ad that expresses one or more defined requirements (much like a job ad). If a requirement matches my skill set, I would feel compelled to at least take a peek.
Keywords could be
- Talented C# developers
- Programmers with good writing skills for the end-user documentation
- People to update our API docs
- People with experience in .NET 3.5
- C++ devs with deep knowledge of Linux memory management
- Devs for refactoring the foobar module for the upcoming 2.0 release
- Spanish speakers to translate the end-user documentation
etc.etc.
Hardly any of the ads I've seen transport this kind of specific message.
Just my 2 cents for the upcoming new round of ads!
