[Ambassadors] More thoughts on the education process and new contributors in general

[David Nalley]

http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~budd/419/
I have reread this web page sent to me by Tim Budd at OSU about 3-4
times now and think that you should as well.
Many of his reasons why students should get involved in OSS I share
and have heard and echoed - though not quite as concisely or
elegantly.
Perhaps this is better suited for the f-mentors list, but I'll toss it
out here as I think it's equally applicable to us, as we are
constantly dealing with potential and new contributors. Please take a
look specifically at the Merit Badge section of the above page. I
think that we should implement such a roadmap for new contributors. If
we get someone excited about Fedora and they want to help - we should
treat them like a student - who is going to have a varied skillset -
and that there should be a defined set of things that they work
through. I am not talking about signing up for a FAS account or
sending an introduction email to the list - though that needs to be
there. I am also not suggesting that this be mandatory But how about -
brand new contributors - they join - they desperately look for
something to do - the potentially flail about IRC and mailing lists
announcing their presence and availability - and I'd guess a good
portion of the time they fall by the wayside. There are some universal
things that contributors need to know/understand/grok. They need to
understand bugzilla - they need to read bugs, file bugs, what makes a
bug complete and  see the workflow - so lets let them do some bug
triage - it's relatively easy. So we say work on 50 bugs and come back
to the next task - gardening the wiki - learning how to add content,
structure, and cleaning up 20 or so pages. etc etc. If they find
something they love doing - let them jump off of the track there and
do that until/if they get ready to do more.

Every company, when it takes in new employees has (or should have) an
orientation process. While I don't think that we should make it
mandatory - I think that if a new user comes along and says I want to
get involved - where do I start - we need to have an answer.

I know lmacken is working on some task queueing stuff for new
contributors and that may obsolete the above idea, but it is a problem
I perceive.



Thoughts, comments, flames?