Hello everyone, I'm quite new at Debian, and I'm attending the DebConf10, New York. Amazing BTW.
So, I've been watching the talks, and a few had some things in common. Like how to get new people to contribute/collaborate with Debian. Main point in this e-mail. I'm new, I've been learning things consulting some docs, asking for people I know, and trying to help step-by-step. So if the things I'll say do not apply or already been discussed please, let me know, or show me where I can discuss those topics. When a new potential contributor(future, or not) or a user try to get some information what does hi gets? What's his/her first impression? IRC, Mail list, wiki, huge number of documentation to read, etc (man man ?). The fist impression is one of the most import items to get new people working on/using Debian, or any other project. I'm mean, If it's difficult to get information, like how to contribute, people may think is hard to contribute/use. (motivation). Yep, I do like irc, like mail(lie), and like to read documentation(when it was written to be read!!! | when I find it). My main point here is that our new users, maybe are not comfortable with our way to release information. Things are changing, people are using forums, web interface tools to translate everything, auto-building tools for many things and blablabla. New, people may not like irc, mail and etc. There are many technologies that can help us to integrate new users to the project. I would like to suggest in this first part, (I know, I suppose not right long e-mails, sorry) a team to work in the capture of new people, discovering problems, looking to take care of our users, our future developers, ours future advertisement. But keeping everything in the Debian way. At this time you must be thinking in give up reading my mail, =/. But, wait, I promise, just a few more lines. (Then you can punch me =/) I was watching the Margarita's talk(Making Debian rule, again), and she showed us a few important items that she asked for some developers. The first tree words were, motivation, visibility and communication. Those tree words are direct connected into a outside idea, e-learning. A student can't study without motivation, to keep going, visibility, he needs to know that his studding for something in future and communication, it's really important for human things, without it, there's no community. If we have a LMS, or another kind of environment to teach our users, future developers and other people related would be a way to capture the attention of users in a way that new people would be comfortable to join us. We can have any kind of courses that can teach people in a easy way. Like, Packaging programs from the source code, Packaging perl programs, Packaging Java, and go on, Debian Publicity, Debian Merchan., DebConf, Advertise, Debian Philosophy, etc. It's not only about to keep the information healthy and easy to be found, easy to be learned. It's about where we wanna be in the future. If we take care of people in a good way now(teaching, make things easier), people will take care of us in a good way on the future. But, many of us maybe do not care about new methods, because our method still working for us. But, what I mean here is until when will we take care of Debian? We need to look forward, thinking about the people who will wanna help, and help then in a way that they can understand us(no, new users don't to read mail with mutt.). Using a teach environment we can: Turn things easier for new people, stop raising the numbers of "look the documentation answers", develop a comfortable way to bring contributors, improve some documentation, raise our visibility in many ways. Yes, I know, (setting up)develop this kind of environment will be pretty hard, boring, annoying and painful. But, why dont we set up a team to look after this kind of problems? So, you can punch me now if I said something stupid. =D But this is my feeling as a user trying to find the ways to contribute now. Sorry about the long e-mail and my pour English. []'s -- Bruno Gurgel Gomes de Oliveira 4Linux Consultant _______________________________________________ Debconf-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-discuss
