I never understood that kind of comment. It's not because someone is suggesting something that he must fill the position. Same thing about bug, it's not because something is wrong that it means that the one who report it must go in the source and fix it. Your comment doesn't provide values at all.
No, I'm not actually suggesting that he should volunteer.
But saying "surely someone can just volunteer" is pointless in the absence of evidence that someone actually wants to volunteer. If anything the evidence points to not enough volunteer triage PMs - the OSS world is not short on projects that could use a triager.
Oh, that's absolutely true. There are far too few people stepping forward to fill non-technical roles in OSS. And that's a shame, because I think it would really help get some projects off the group, and help others keep their communities together.
But I didn't say "surely someone can just volunteer". I said that they should "get someone to join". There are a lot of ways to do that, and many of them involve the current team members being proactive about going out and trying to recruit someone to fill that role. The OSS communities can't just rely on the "if you build it they will come" philosophy -- if you really want your project to grow, you have to be willing to put yourself forward and actively get people to help you.
> There are a lot of ways to do that, and many of them involve the current team members being proactive about going out and trying to recruit someone to fill that role.
Orrrr the current team members can be proactive and do something that will reduce the number of bad bug reports they get.
It's the old "OH you have a problem or a request with some open source project? Then how about YOU write the code/solve the problem! It's open source you know!"
It's a canned response that people roll out whenever anything is raised about an open source project.
Believe it or not, there are professional PMs who are just as interested in open source in their free time as some professional software engineers are. I'm not one of them -- I'm an engineer -- but I know some.
It would be a good opportunity for people who would like to contribute to an open source project who might have less technical experience or time. Mozilla has many indispensable volunteers who help triage and "groom" Firefox bugs in Bugzilla. They are a huge help. :)
That sounds simple. You're volunteering, then?