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[Jeremy Katz]

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.

The opposite is the case in a lot of cases where dealing with code -- I
don't want to give people access to a group (which gives them commit
access) until they've proven that they are actually writing good
patches, etc.  Or access to cvsextras until they've shown they can build
packages and had them reviewed. 

So maybe it's a difference between groups which are "hi I'm interested"
and "this group gives me access to something".  

> 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?

How does it restrict the work they can do if you move it to later?  In
the case of the art team, the flow would be something like
1) Become interested, find out about art group, get on mailing
list/irc/whatever
2) Start to work on some cool new needed piece of art
3) To take the contribution, we ask that you sign the CLA

as opposed to

1) Become interested, sign CLA, create account
2) Find something you're interested in, find out about art group, ...
3) Work on cool new thing

Given that in the first case, I'll actually be talking with people who
can help me with the account process, it feels a bit better.

But maybe 

Jeremy