Okay, a little late and it's awesome that this thread has generated so much noise. Going to try to cut through it and offer some of my own feedback.
On 08/29/2016 12:16 PM, Ankur Sinha wrote:
> Hiya,
>
> 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?).
On this note specifically, for Flock 2016, Bee Padalkar (FAS: bee2502)
gave a presentation that looked at the average lifecycle / length of
interest of a contributor's time in Fedora. I think Sachin also
contributed stats to this as well. :) I *highly* *highly* recommend
watching this talk and passing any questions along too:
https://youtu.be/BzoN8RDK98A
https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-flock-openqa/2016-08-02/flock2016.2016-08-02-09.02.log.html
> - 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.
>
> 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?
>
The idea itself is sound and I have no objections. However, I think
since this SIG formed, a lot of things have changed in the project. For
one, CommOps addresses many of the bigger, more abstract goals of this
SIG (e.g. thinking of on-boarding resources and improving communication
for old and new contributors in the project). CommOps spends a lot of
time focusing on on-boarding resources, so I think it would be a better
use of people power to focus discussion on on-boarding (from a general
perspective) to CommOps.
I think the Join SIG still has its place as a group to be an active
participant with newcomers and to help coordinate outreach events
targeted towards bringing new people into the project (I'm already
thinking of ways Diversity Team and Join SIG could partner on this too).
> 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;
In order for the SIG to really take focus, I think we'll need someone to
really take lead and charge on this. I'm willing to follow here. :)
> - 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.
Hopefully this is something CommOps could help with.
> - 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)
>
> Other related reasons:
> - we don't meet often (but do we need regular IRC meetings?)
>
We could meet monthly or once every other week to work through existing
items, make progress on any goals we have, or even come up with items
and make the goals. :)
> 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?
I think this should be the first step - I don't think we're at a
capacity where we should start flagging and highlighting the SIG yet -
there's not enough active members on the list and in the channel to keep
up with even the minimal traffic we get now, sometimes. I'd prefer to
focus on a SOP and resources to quickly give a first, helpful response
to a newcomer or someone looking at getting started.
> - 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?
> - 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?
I think this is also a possibility. :)
> - 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.)
> - 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.
Hope some of these thoughts are helpful. :)
>
> 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/
> _______________________________________________
> fedora-join mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/[email protected]
>
--
Cheers,
Justin W. Flory
[email protected]
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