Join Page Refresh

[Paul W. Frields]

On Wed, 2008-07-23 at 21:58 +0100, Jonathan Roberts wrote:
> 2008/7/23 Jeremy Katz <katzj at redhat.com>:
> > On Wed, 2008-07-23 at 20:56 +0100, Jonathan Roberts wrote:
> >> How Do I Join?
> >>
> >>  * Get an account (link)
> >>  * Pick a team
> >>  * Get involved/Do something!
> >
> > This still feels a bit backwards to me.  Getting an account isn't the
> > first thing that you should do to get involved with Fedora.  Instead,
> > it's actually finding that area of your itch to scratch, picking your
> > team or whatever phrasing you want to put around it.  And then you
> > probably want to be on the mailing list/irc channel/whatever and
> > communicate with them.  And then, once you're more sure it's something
> > you want to do and are really getting involved and "doing" things,
> > *that* is when having the account matters.
> 
> My thought was that by having an account and have signed the click
> through CLA, it's then possible for new contributors to really get
> stuck in and do some actual work once they've found the team they want
> to help. The art team does this very well as is: a new person gets an
> account and then applies for the art-group, they are then asked in a
> welcome e-mail to introduce themselves on list and work on an item in
> the art team's design request queue. This is a model that I think we
> want to try and pursue in other areas.
> 
> If we deal with it carefully then we can avoid the "I have an account,
> now what?" situation, or so I believe.
> 
> I definitely agree with your point, however, that the most important
> thing is to get a new contributor interacting and working with the
> other members of the team they would like to be a part of. Signing up
> for an account with the CLA is so easy now though, why restrict the
> work they can do by pushing this to a later point in the process?

Yes, and there are easy targets someone can hit, like wiki fixing, that
it doesn't make sense to shunt people away from.  This is especially
true since people in general are getting more exposure to that model of
jumpin in from other well-known sites.

I do agree that following up with tasks (for data-oriented people) or
introductions (for social-oriented people) is an important part of this
puzzle.  And that, according to Luke, is the primary goal for one of the
projects he's working on.

-- 
Paul W. Frields
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://paul.frields.org/   -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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