On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 12:16 PM, Ankur Sinha <[email protected]> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA256 > > Hiya, > Hi Ankur! > > Before I begin, if you're a member of the Fedora community already, > please apply for membership to the fedora-join group in FAS[1]. > (That'll give us an idea of how many community members are interested > in the SIG.) If you are a newbie and haven't introduced yourself yet, > please do so. > > It's a somewhat long e-mail, but please bear with me and skim through > it. I encourage *everyone* to reply to this e-mail with ideas/comments! > > Background and aim of this group > - --------------------------------- > > For years now, we've heard that new potential contributors (henceforth > referred to as "newbies") have a hard time joining the community. The > reasons for this include, but are not limited to: > > - - newbies are timid (think squirrels!) > - - newbies aren't used to the open source way of self education (Google > the hell out of things, RTFM attitude, shamelessly ask questions if > needed, NO spoon feeding and so on) > - - newbies lose interest if they don't make friends and integrate into > the community in a few weeks (few days?). > - - the community is *vast*, spread over different teams with their own > systems and procedures, and for someone new, finding the right > people/channels/procedures can be quite daunting. > - - community members are usually quite busy to give detailed replies - > we're all volunteers here. > - - more? > So the idea of setting up the SIG was to set up channels of > communication where newbies can come and in an extremely friendly > environment form relationships within themselves, and with the > community. > As tobi mentioned, mentorship sounds like a really good idea. This will definitely help out a lot of so so-called "newbies" get started. I know how it feels like to be one and I must say I was really hesitant to start mailing list threads in the beginning. Apart from this, it'll also be a nice idea to have weekly/bi-weekly/monthly meetings on the channel or any of the fedora meeting channels to keep track of things and help newcomers there. I see traces of fedora-join meetings in meetbot[1] but looks like it's not active now. It'll be really nice if someone can step-up and conduct meetings. > > For this to work, we need: > > - - the infrastructure. We have: > * #fedora-join > * this mailing list > - - community members hanging out in these channels and willing to speak > to newbies, help them get in touch with the right people, help them > find the right resources, and so on. > - - newbies. > > I hope this makes sense to everyone? Does everyone agree that the idea > is a sane one? Any tweaks? > > How are we doing? > - ------------------ > > Well, not too good, I'd say. We've helped out some folks in the past, > but we're not as active as we should be. Ideally, we should be up to > our ears in e-mails and questions and people. So why aren't we? > > - - Part of this is of course because we're busy with other things; > - - Part of this is also because we haven't managed to gain enough > traction to get more members of the community involved in helping out > at the group. > - - I'm not sure the entire community is aware of the existence of the > channels we've set up > - - I'm not sure if we are visible enough for newbies to find us (for > example, we're not on whatcanidoforfedora.org) > > Hmm, isn't the website a part of the Fedora Join effort to bring in more contributors? I don't see how it'll fit in there. We can definitely have a footer which says "More Questions? Talk to us on #fedora-join on Freenode" or something along those lines. > Other related reasons: > - - we don't meet often (but do we need regular IRC meetings?) > > What can we do? > - --------------- > > Now, this is the interesting bit! What do we do to improve the current > state? Events (physical/IRC), make more noise, turn up in the right > places, make ourselves more visible? > > Off the top of my head: > - - We should make more noise to inform the community that we're here to > help newbies get started > - - I think we need to be better organised. For example, we don't have a > SOP document (standard operating procedure) to guide either newbies or > contributors to this group. Maybe we can set up a pagure repo where we > open a new ticket for each newbie, and then close it when the newbie's > integrated nicely with the community? > - - We need to embrace metrics too - how many newbies do we have on this > list? How many have we helped? Maybe we can set up a feedback form and > request newbies to fill it out when they're ready? How many > contributors do we have on this list? How often do people refer newbies > to our channels? > I can work on the metrics part of it. I am working on a tool[2] to gather user statistics and recently added a feature to get statistics of an entire FAS group. The tool requires polishing and I'm planning to have a web interface for it soon. If you guys can tell me what kind of stats/metrics is required, I can ready 'em up :) - - We need to integrate better with the community - we seem to be a > standalone group at the moment, and that just won't work. Maybe we > could integrate with CommOps better, since CommOps has members from the > different teams? > Sounds like a plan, I will open a ticket regarding this and discuss in tomorrow's CommOps meeting. cc-ing CommOps here for more comments. > - - Maybe an IRC meeting a month just to keep ourselves active wouldn't > be such a bad idea? > +1 > - - The fas group is only for community members, do we need another for > newbies? Should we just open the group to newbies? (This can then be > used to give them wiki access which has been limited to cla+1 to deal > with spam.) > Spammers are social engineering a lot nowadays. We cannot really afford to open up to new contributors just yet. > - - What else? > > > Please, add to this list! > > > Other stuff > - ------------ > > Please do keep up with the Fedora hubs initiative[2]. It's going to be > marvellous! It also has some functionality to enable people to join > groups, but I still don't think it's a complete replacement for good > old school conversation when it comes to forming relationships. > > > Please, do reply to this e-mail with whatever ideas you have - we can't > improve things without ideas and discussion. > > I'm still drowning in work, but when I do have time off (like this long > weekend!), I'm going to be active. Most of you know that I lurk in a > lot of fedora channels as FranciscoD, please feel free to ping me. > > [1] https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/group/view/fedora-join > [2] https://fedoramagazine.org/5tftw-2015-06-19/ > - -- > Thanks, > Regards, > Ankur Sinha "FranciscoD" > > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ankursinha > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v2 > > iQEcBAEBCAAGBQJXxF/7AAoJEPjYwL66yJi90g8IAJKimXJRaGhbEIpKnYrpTRyk > ltCHacYwwSpI2LJBKtmdvtZ9WU87r9/UgHDxOs8AB/BkFML56h6TU+jAkOOmo0CA > i9anYGk9gcinBrWhEx43uKBlEEDKzX0abCKn0YlbWZbCVYml+Es5GnRMZjYNoTK+ > tvUz6S3giWJPM+RD13dDQKXtEBW+Ep2dZkuDD/V4EWM6xFeJLeKbPyEs3U8Owr4Y > RyNTE0IEUoldohQKbeTyEfIbgXbuBOUl3QV31kZUiVZKHo3LFYO11dw2XZCVzUgC > O/Rc2B2CQCJh1soT/p6Y+sarpBWd65v/P96EFNUsiiQodMXCv8/4ja8WP9gjSi4= > =92aM > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > _______________________________________________ > fedora-join mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/fedora-join@ > lists.fedoraproject.org > -- Cheers, Sachin S. Kamath https://www.sachinwrites.xyz [1] https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/sresults/?group_id=fedora-join&type=team [2] https://pagure.io/gsoc-stats
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