Pain points of learning and contributing in the Drupal community

http://www.slideshare.net/kgoel1/pain-points-of-learning-and-contributing-in-the-drupal-community

The Drupal community is very welcoming and encouraging to new contributors. We help them, we guide them, but we can offer more. Many new contributors are excited and willing to make more significant impacts on core, but they do not want to be limited to just easy/novice level tasks. Going from novice to regular contributor is a long and difficult journey.  We already do a lot to address the low-hanging fruit, but offer little help to those willing to go further and work on more complex issues.

We will present on - 

• High barriers to contributing
• Complexity of various subsystems
• Lack of documentation
• Misleading API documentation
• Define continous contribution 

We will discuss on -

• How can we provide better opportunities so nascent contributors get what they need to keep on contributing?
• How can a contributor pass the barrier of making their first commit and more importantly, continue committing?
• How can we improve so that more than 20% of contributors have more than 5 commits?
• How can we make the barrier low for contributors going from novice to regular contributor?