What are the biggest barriers to walking the MOTU/developer path? [closed]

For those who are not MOTU (people who maintain the Universe and Multiverse software repositories) and do not have plans of the "I will apply to MOTU by $date" variety:

What keeps you and others like you from trying to become MOTU? What makes you think you couldn't become one?

I'm referring to both social and technological barriers.

EDIT: I'm only saying MOTU because it's a pretty generic group, but "why aren't you packaging / patching and intending to eventually try for upload rights?" is an even more general version.

I think the biggest technical barrier is knowing how to create Debian packages. While it is relatively simple to create a working package, it is much harder to create packages up to the standard of Debian and Ubuntu. Also, the guides on how to create packages normally deal with a situation in which you have the source code that requires compiling. This can be confusing for applications written in interpreted languages.

The biggest social barrier is probably knowing how to get packages uploaded into the universe/multiverse repositories. It is a lot simpler to just create your own ppa and upload packages there.

Provide better documentation.

I have taken part in the developer weeks IRC sessions related to packaging and MOTU stuff (twice already) and found that during those sessions you typically have a vague understanding of the process. But if you look at the Ubuntu wiki pages two weeks later, you can't get all the pieces together anymore. Those pages often are kind of a bullet point lists from people who already understand the process in detail. But that is not enough to make the content understandable for newbies.

So maybe you should try to get the documentation wiki pages explain the process, tools and people involved in more detail. Or even with complete examples. During the IRC sessions there are always repeatable examples, maybe those make the difference to the wiki pages.

Nowadays people like drive-by contributions.

20 years ago you would typically focus a lot of your energy on a pet project, if you had one. Today you visit dozens of Internet pages a day, and there are lots of social networks or other communities, where you can contribute to wikis, forums and other stuff. While this has led to more people contributing, it also led to people expecting low barrier entries (a la "just click the website to edit it). Otherwise they may just turn to other communities.

Therefore you should look for barriers in the MOTU process. I remember the GroundControl project to lower the barrier for patch contributions in launchpad hosted projects. Maybe you need similar new tools, so new MOTU candidates don't have to fiddle with a lot of command line tools. While those current tools may be powerful, it probably takes a lot of energy to learn how to use them correctly.