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[Jonathan Roberts]

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?

Best,

Jon