Following along the theme of Elizabeth Naramore's post on open source involvement, Brandon Savage has posted some thoughts of his own (and reinforces hers) on encouraging developers to get involved and out contributing to some of their favorite projects.

Leaders of the open source community are always trying to encourage others to contribute. Volunteer contributors are always in short supply, and most open source projects are driven by volunteers, so recruitment is a big component of any open source project lead.

One of his main points to add to Elizabeth's list was that the architecture of the application matters. He gives an example of a project (the Phergie IRC bot) that is well-architected and makes adding in new plugins simple because of planning. He also shares a few other suggestions to help encourage open source participation like good documentation, good involvement from project leads and mentoring the "newbies" to help get the ball rolling.