So it's already time for the conclusions:
3 tweets were sent with equivalent wording and different bugs; they received a roughly similar amount of reactions (between 25 and 40 likes/RTs).
Only the 1st one attracted a new contributor who got a patch merged. However, both other bugs got totally ignored, no reaction took place on Bugzilla.
My guess is that the next issues are less trivial and require some pre-existing understanding of some Eclipse Plugin development. I believe that the technical bar to fix the issues is already too high for the @EclipseJavaIDE twitter audience.
Negative side: Eclipse SDK doesn't have many really trivial issues in the pipe; or at least not in an easily identifiable way. Finding 3 "affordable" issues required some triaging effort from several contributors, and the result is not so positive for at least 2 of them. The "bugday" and "helpwanted" keywords don't help here.
If we want to continue such a campaign, I believe we need more trivial fixes. But this experiment has highlighted that the backlog doesn't contain enough easy fixes and that finding one is taking a lot of time and energy to some contributors. The approach of digging for an easy enough fix is too expensive IMO. So regularly spending this time in finding 1 easy bug and planning such tweets on a regular basis is IMO not profitable/sustainable; and should be discarded for the moment.
Positive side: However, we also had a "demonstration by example" (with the very poor reliability of such demonstrations ;) that going social on simplest bugs can attract new contributors. That's quite important to know that.
My proposal to carry on on this topic is that instead of planning tweets and crawling the backlog for a trivial fix (which may not exist), we instead switch to a "push" model, where some experienced contributor who identifies a trivial fix should immediately share a Bugzilla link with @EclipseJavaIDE owners so they then plan an #easyFix tweet for it and hopefully attract a new contributor like it happened with this campaign.
What do you think?
