Hi, Background: today on IRC Lucas suggested I browse the GNOME Love pages and list what I think could be improved. Previously I commented that, perhaps, having a wiki page, called something like GnomeLoveBoard, would be a better approach for maintainers to advertise tasks and new contributors to find them, as my impression is that potential contributors may not be aware of all the possibilities for contribution in existing projects.
The assumption is that http://live.gnome.org/JoinGnome is the first page one looks at, looking at the Development section and going to http://live.gnome.org/GnomeLove . Instead of throwing numerous lists from start to finish, some parts of this (GnomeLove) page could be organised and written more like an article. Some ideas: - Move the Contacts part to the bottom, and put the link to p.g.o. there. - Don't list that many links to articles (cca 25) on this page. In the Getting started section, begin saying that everyone should first learn something about the platform; suggest that, for instance, everyone should read "How to Start Your GNOME journey", "Overview of the GNOME Platform" and, the folks who've never developed in the open source community, "Thoughts about working on Free Software". - Move all the other link groups (Technical guides, Articles & tutorials, Books) to another page. There should be a maintained page that contains links to all GNOME-related tutorials, articles and books, be it part of the wiki or located elsewhere. Explain that that is where one should look for when in need to learn more, depending on the project and task. - "You don't know which project you want to work on" && "You want to work on a specific project" A person coming to this page might rather have an idea of willing to contribute to a couple of projects which he finds particularly interesting, and is looking for some kind of a task list where, seeing what's listed and based to his skills and amount of free time (and how much he finds the task attractive), he could decide which one to pick. I think these two sections could be merged into one ("You want to work on a specific project") and the link to all gnome-love bugs moved below the project list. I wouldn't know, but I doubt that many people have begun contributing to a GNOME project after browsing this bug list. - Most projects maintain a pretty much up to date project page on l.g.o., with information about tasks, mailing list, how to help etc; some have a very nice regularly-updated roadmap page which everyone in a perfect world should maintain for their projects. Anyway, I think that it should be emphasized here that roadmaps are TODO lists for maintainers to keep as they work but also have tasks which maintainers do not have time to work on atm and would really love someone for getting it done. The application list on the GnomeLove page could then be a list of all GNOME projects with a paragraph explaining in short how to get involved (can be just copied and pasted from a project page, it's still more human than a <a href="l.g.o/$APP>$APP</a>) and an example medium-level task to give a feeling of what these tasks are. All maintainers should be encouraged to list their project here (atm there are only 17) and maintain their little space regularly (!) - many of the current links are quite outdated, CVS is mentioned etc. Marko _______________________________________________ gnome-love mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-love
