In order to convince people to contribute, I have designed a screencast to show people that it's easier than they think.
The screencast is available on Youtube. Unfortunately I'm really incompetent and I used my laptop's internal microphone, so there's a lot of noise and cracks. Perhaps I should sucker someone else into making my screencast for me...
Hi! My name is lvh and I've been suckered into writing a PEP.
I'm not going to get out from under it anymore, but I'm going to try to turn it into the world's least plausible Ponzi scheme. Basically, that means I plan to sucker you into helping me write it, and then, hopefully, some of you will do unto others what has been done unto you.
I say "world's least plausible" because Ponzi schemes are supposed to promise you massive riches, and all I promise you is that it won't hurt very much. I'm going to try and show you just how easy it is to contribute.
Let's start by intentionally saying something stupid in the PEP.
> hackety hackety hack
Okay, so we commit and push that...
> hackety hackety hack
Now let's take a look at the Github page and refresh... Okay, there's the commit.
Now let's say you're a random not-yet-contributor and you're reading the current draft version of the PEP. Now, you might think: "huh, that's bad, maybe I should fix it". But then you think: "ugh, never mind! I'd have to fork it, change it, commit it, push it, create a pull request... Way too much effort!". And you'd be completely wrong!
You see, Github has this awesome "Edit file" feature. Let's see what happens when you click it!
> hackety hackety hack
Now, because it's my repository, it'll automagically commit. However, when you do it, it'll automagically fork, commit and create that pull request. Most of the time, I'll just be able to merge it instantly.
Now of course, you're in your browser, so you might not have access to Emacs, which, to quote the FLUFL, is the only reason to have a screen and a keyboard attached to any computer ever. However, if you can tell me what needs fixing that a decent editor could but your browser can't, I will personally fix it for you. I will gladly do stuff like fixing a heading or a link or an overly wide column in a paragraph, or anything of the sort. This is a Ponzi scheme of pain, and as with most people at the top of the Ponzi scheme, I'll end up with the majority of it.
In short, contribution to the async PEP is easy and fun! Well, okay, it's not -- but it's probably easier than you may have thought it was.
So please: watch the project on Github, contribute to it, submit tickets to the issue tracker... Any and all input is appreciated.
Thanks in advance!