Basically, GNOME needs new developers. The best way to do that is to lower
the barriers to entry for new developers. That needs to start with the
website. In fact, I really think that getting new people in and involved is
probably the most important job of the website, as it is the first thing
that newbies will go to, while more experienced hackers go to lists and IRC
for information first. 

My email to gnome-hackers, which includes a lot of links and suggestions:

On Sat, 2002-04-20 at 11:49, Luis Villa wrote:
> -----Forwarded Message-----
> |
> | From: Luis Villa <louie@ximian.com>
> |
> | BTW, for those without copies of the code,
> | http://developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html has some good instructions for
> | getting started with GNOME CVS. 
> 
> So, that's the best I could come up with last night for a 'getting
> started with GNOME programming' URL. If we're going to attract new
> hacking blood, as discussed at the BOF at guadec, we've just got to have
> better getting started docs, pointing at stuff like any gtk tutorials we
> have, the HIG guidelines, this CVS page, etc. Unfortunately, I'm
> completely unqualified to write such a page myself :/ but I hope someone
> who is will take the time. We badly need new hackers and something like
> this can help make that happen. Or at least that seemed to be the
> consensus at the BOF...

So after some poking... I found a lot of links, but none of them are
particularly prominent on the web site, or even accessible from there. And
they ought to be. :)

More than anything else:
http://developer.gnome.org/ needs to have 'getting involved' big and at the
top of the page, not buried at the bottom. Ditto for
http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/ .

Some links:

http://developer.gnome.org/documents/joining-gnome/index.html [Really good
bit by Dan Mueth; ought to be more prominent on the web site and could
maybe use a bit of reorganization in the format- maybe even split in to
'joining for hackers' and 'joining for non-hackers.']

http://developer.gnome.org/doc/guides/programming-guidelines/book1.html
[coding guidelines. Good stuff for newbies but you have to go to the docs
page to find it.]

http://www.gnome.org/~chema/gnome-love/compiling_faq.html [again, great
stuff that ought to be linked to directly from the 'getting involved' page
and also from http://developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html]

Essays on hacking, gnome and otherwise:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-love/2001-May/msg00105.html
http://www106.pair.com/rhp/hacking.html
http://www.advogato.org/article/22.html
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html [good points for
newbies coming to a list]

Anyway, I've filed this against the website