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?
That's a separate problem.. haha!
Derric - in reply to your concerns... just a few points 1) The mediawiki homepage puts ME off. This is mainly because I'm more interested in doing things with the data on wikipedia rather than the software that runs Wikipedia. I think this is the problem we are trying to solve - there are many different types of developers out there and we need something generic to appeal to as many of them as possible.
2) I agree personal appeals need to be well written - but I feel we have lots of expertise around to help us with that if that is something we want to do
3) Agreed with presentation - the wall of text approach doesn't work. I should have stated in my original mail that people should focus on the text itself rather than presentation. I would expect us to reuse the fundraiser presentation style. There is no way this alone would suffice.
4) I don't think this would attract so many memes - several reasons - one it is a link on the bottom of the page and out of most of people's view - two we don't even have to show photos - we could show people's avatars or the apps/extensions people have built instead.
Also if we do attract memes maybe that is a measure of success as it shows we are successfully attracting people to our developer page ;-)