Is anyone else excited about this idea or is it just me...?
That is an intriguing concept that could indeed work quite well to get people interested, but how many will remain interested after they encounter gerrit?
I can't actually say I like this idea a whole lot. Here's why: * Personal appeals have to be well written in order to work. A poorly written personal appeal will not actually appeal to someone and may in fact turn them away. * We use personal appeals for the fund raising drive. I think using them here as well, especially when we have these [1] going on every year is a bad idea. * A personal appeal on a page like this is a wall of text. We need to be very careful not to elicit the "TL;DR" response from people. ** On a similar vein: This page needs to be fairly appealing in appearance, like the MediaWiki.org homepage is, or people will leave.
In my experience, programmers are very practical pragmatic people. I don't think that a personal appeal is the best way to appeal to them. At least not how the idea is currently presented. The Mediawiki.org homepage does a better job of getting my hyped to use Mediawiki right now.
[1]: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wikipedia-fundraising-campaign