As with Mark's response on OSGI this morning, there have been a number of answers to questions on this list that mention that components are either not currently being worked on, or which request that users contribute new features or patches.

It tends not to be that easy to get to grips with a large open source project, so recently the London Java Community organised an OpenJDK hack session (http://www.meetup.com/Londonjavacommunity/events/49243872/) where they were helping people to build the projects and working on some 'low-hanging-fruit' issues. And apparently the session produced around 20 patches, which seems pretty impressive to me given that it was just a 3-hour evening session.

There seems to be a reasonable number of Drools developers and users in or near London, although I'm not sure about other locations. So I was wondering how feasible it might be to organise something similar around Drools. Obviously it would need a combination of some core developers prepared to spend some of their time helping folks such as myself get to grips with building and testing things, and enough developers interested in spending their spare time learning their way around the internals of the various Drools components. The London JBoss User Group set up a JBoss AS7 hackathon last year, so perhaps there might be someone there who would be prepared to help out?