Lack of recorded contributions in some projects: We opened a discussion and came up with some theories, see mailing list discussion: Tooling training for ASF projects.
possible reasons why:
The skill level required in the project is too high and/or
the wording of the project is a bit intimidating due to the technical language or unclear goals
High system requirements
possible solutions:
setup cheat sheet + more guided or explained tasks. Include this sheet in the project submission to guide applicants in their initial contributions. we've seen sometimes there is no time to address all queries/questions from applicants, therefore we could include this sheet to help them guide themselves.
we need a more easy-to-start development environment. regarding applicants with less experience. In this case, it is hard to find a solution other than committing enough mentor time, which is hard to find.
Examples: how to make the first code line to contribute.
Task assigned to Matt Sicker: Begin a confluence page for gathering documentation on how to get started contributing to Apache projects in general (e.g., Jira, Maven, Git, etc.)
