Practically you are saying: Mageia has successfully accomplished its
first milestone - a small team has produced a high-quality release. Now
comes the second one - harness the community to keep it running and make
it grow.
I am one of those who signed up and, so far has not "delivered" - the
reasons, as I understand them, may apply to other users: the
organisation of future Mandriva activities into teams is great, nothing
to say to that. But I wonder whether the titles defined for the teams
are a sufficient roster when it comes to members of the community to
judge where they fit in - how to best make a match between their
competences and the requirements enumerated by Romain and Wobo.
Example 1: I had signed up for QA - thought that my generalist knowledge
and being a long standing and critical user would be sufficient as a
qualification - after a first dicussion I got cold feet and concluded
that I do not qualify - maybe right, maybe wrong. I would like to have
have a yardstick to allow a more objective assessment.
Example 2: Web-team - what does that mean, what skills is Mandriva
looking for? content-oriented skills (producing kilometers of text on
such and such), technical skills (building, enhancing the
infrastructure), PR skills (using the web for selling the good news
about Mageia)?
Some suggestions (sorry - more work for the existing team):
- Remaining in the roster of team titles: write a couple of lines that
allow community members to judge whether they can contribute to a team
or not
- Complement the team-name roster by a skill roster - by list of
activities that need to be done, requiring certain skills - that may end
up in channeling people into specific teams.
- Probably also consider some kind of "interviewing", a dialogue between
a "recruiter" and a "candidate" where both sides can clarify whether
there is match between the required and offered profile.
That may sound administrative and over-formal - I think it is a way to
bootstrap the "community network" that an outfit like Mageia needs in
order to prosper. There is need for a second round - the first was hands
up for documenting willingness to help, the second one needs some kind
of recruitement mechanism to match need and offered skills.
Personally, I will try yet another approach: write to Wobo&Cie and do
"inverse interviewing" ask them for feedback.
