With a huge variety of importable datasets (covering history, geography, organizational structures), Gramps can be used to evaluate, illustrate and teach.
It can also be used as a platform for experimenting with programming graphics, big data analysis, user interface design and many other things.
If you have a friend who is a gifted programmer or graphics person, maybe you could entice them to do a widget with the Gramps platform? Ask a favor to see if they could make that graph that you always coveted and gift the enhancement to our whole community. It might just be a prettier version of a graph with more elegant borders & colors.
Or you might sponsor a bounty in some of the hackathons around the world. They are often are looking for community oriented bite-sized (or should that be byte sized?) 1-day or 2-day projects.
In a previous discussion, a fellow user complained that Gramps was not open enough, and although it is possible to hack Gramps XML, he does have a point.
Can we do something about that, to make Gramps more attractive?
Can you point to that discussion where they hopefully explain how it is not open enough?
XML isn’t the working format, merely an archival and transfer format.
And there is a target to to eliminate the pickling serialization in the database files. Which should open options for external manipulations and add-on based tools. (There have been indications that will not be ready for 5.2 though.)
While active recruiting can be targeted and effective, it may be slow. What about considering passive recruitment which needs effort up front, but could help recruit people whom we might never have reached otherwise, with minimal on-going time investment?
A strategy several open source projects use is tagging their issues with labels like “Good first issue,” “Help Wanted,” or “Up for grabs.” As an example see Microsoft’s Open Source Get Involved page. Anyone who lands on the repo and has some curiosity may be tempted to take a shot at those issues.
While Gramps doesn’t use GitHub issues, we could consider doing something similar with Mantis BT. Open issues can be tagged with similarly inviting tags, identifying them as easy first issues, feature enhancements, etc. In Mantis BT, create new summary views based on those tags, and the README.md file from GitHub could lead visitors to those views.