[RFQ] Additional self-intro question

[Stuart Ellis]

On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 15:17 -0600, Patrick Barnes wrote:
> On Monday 13 March 2006 14:54, Stuart Ellis wrote:
> > On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 12:30 -0600, Tommy Reynolds wrote:
> > > The response to the last several self-intro's was to ask if the
> > > candidate wanted to be assigned a task.  Should we add one more
> > > question to the self-intro template at
> > >
> > > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/SelfIntroduction
> > >
> > > that asks the "are you self-directed or do you want to be assigned a
> > > task" question.  Maybe replace the "anything else special" question.
> > >
> > > Or does that remove the personal touch?
> >
> > Mmm...it does sound a bit "tick the box that applies to you" when done
> > that way.
> >
> > Maybe we should go a bit further with the hand-holding, and offer a
> > meeting/tutorial on IRC to people who Self Intro. It seems like we get
> > Self Intros, suggest areas of work to them and have a pleasant e-mail
> > exchange, and then nothing further really happens.
> 
> I think somewhat of a compromise is in order.  Instead of asking such a 
> specific question, we could ask a more generic question.  We need something 
> that is an ambiguous question, requires a bit of thought, and will always 
> result in a personally unique answer.  This question should attempt to 
> determine not only whether we need to assign tasks to them, but also what we 
> can do to help them work most effectively.  We could then continue to engage 
> them knowing a little better what to expect.
> 
> A few ideas:
> 
> "How can we best help you get started?"
> 	This will usually result in either a request for specific tasks or a request 
> for information so that they may get started on their own.
> 
> "What sort of workflow do you feel most comfortable with?"
> 	This will usually result in an explanation of a process as they picture it, 
> by which documents can be prepared, reviewed, and published.  Thanks to 
> ambiguity, we can also expect unexpected ideas or processes, perhaps beyond 
> the true meaning of the question.
> 
> "What is your ideal work environment?"
> 	This is also ambiguous and can result in different types of answers.  With a 
> little luck, the person would describe the sort of relationships they expect 
> to see within the project.  We also might hear some innovative ideas for both 
> physical and electronic environments that improve efficiency.

(I've taken the liberty of CC'ing this to the FDSCo list).

My suggestion may or not not be a very good one. The problem that I'm
really stuck on is very few people go from saying hello, or doing a
couple of edits of the Wiki, to turn into regular contributors whom we
see routinely.

This "same old faces" problem of having very small team of regulars
doing a big chunk of the work seems pretty common in OSS projects, but
it puts a lot of pressure on those people, and limits the amount of work
that can be done. Currently, I don't expect more than one of the draft
documents on the Wiki to be developed to a shippable state by the time
that FC6 is released.

I'm not sure that better processes/technology can help us much in this
regard - to produce a tutorial or guide requires one or two people to
spend a fair amount of time hammering away at the raw content, and we
don't have many people consistently doing that work. The systems for
handling content are shaping up to be awesome, but we currently have
relatively few documents to make use of them...

-- 

Stuart Ellis

stuart at elsn.org

Fedora Documentation Project: http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject

GPG key ID: 7098ABEA
GPG key fingerprint: 68B0 E291 FB19 C845 E60E  9569 292E E365 7098 ABEA
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