Proposed: A formal working group around how we welcome new folks in a consistent and helpful manner.
We get people on this list (and on every dev@ and user@ list at the foundation) asking how to get engaged. We almost always give them unhelpful answers, and send them off to go figure it out on their own. The Welcome WG would write documentation, and process, around welcoming these new folks, and shepherding them towards engagement. This would include, but not be limited to: * Guiding projects towards the incubator. This includes the “why would you want to be at Apache? Why would you *NOT* fit at Apache?” documentation that we really don’t have yet. * Guiding brand-new contributors towards how, and where, to contribute. This may include working with some of our more welcoming projects to figure out best practice, and our less-welcoming projects to figure out why they are and help them fix that. * Working with second-time contributors to encourage best practice. (See https://mikemcquaid.com/stop-mentoring-first-time-contributors/ for thoughts on first- vs second-time contributors) * Crafting boilerplate answers to send to folks who show up asking for help getting involved, so that we don’t continue this practice of unhelpful “go figure it out on your own” responses. * Maybe work on some kind of a badging program (See https://badges.fedoraproject.org/ if you don’t know what I mean by that) to incentivize and gamify community engagement, for reasons that I would love to talk much more about, but are beyond the scope of this proposal. What do y’all think? — Rich Bowen rbo...@rcbowen.com
