Hello Robert and all openSUSE enthusiasts, I can only "speek" from my experience in the dewiki. Am Mittwoch, 4. Dezember 2013, 15:46:42 schrieb Robert Schweikert:
On 12/02/2013 01:22 PM, Manu Gupta wrote:
Hey Robert
If there is anything with respect to getting contributors constantly in even for a part of year, I would love to hear your plans, even if you dont have the time, I am sure it is worth listening and someone might just borrow it from you :)
So my basic goal with a mentor program would be to address 2 major topics I see as hindrance to contribute to openSUSE.
1.) Alleviate or eliminate the feeling overwhelmed effect 2.) Help people find their way around
A third point is providing assistance in learning something new, but that in my mind is a secondary effect.
Our "Just do it" or "almost no rules" culture creates an uncertainty effect for people, IMHO. Often leaving people with a "can I really do this" feeling. Basically there is uncertainty. It takes a certain amount of confidence to get over that hurdle and people new to a project generally do not have that confidence. Secondly size of the project and the many areas where one can contribute also contribute to the "being overwhelmed" feeling.
For new people that may be interested in contributing to the project there is not really a go to point of contact to get their feet wet. So in addition to feeling overwhelmed people feel lost.
These two factors together probably lead to a good number of people that come, take a casual look around and leave.
My thoughts on addressing the issues is to carve the project up into a few general areas, documentation/wiki, packaging, web infrastructure and so on. We can probably define 10 or so general areas, these are not hard lines but general categories that will allow people to ge an overview of things.
For each category we'd have a team experts, 2 or 3 that volunteer to help new comers in that area along. We would also have some documentation in each area. The documentation would include but is not limited to
- a description of what people contributing in this area actually do - a general list of tools being used to contribute in this area - links to repositories, is applicable - a description of expectations that we have from contributors in that area - a list of any prerequisites that might exist
We have allready all this in the wiki. And now look at the active wiki contributor list. https://de.opensuse.org/Spezial:Aktive_Benutzer Look how many have more than 10 acticities in the last 30 days. At the moment we have 3 helper. This is not enough. We have 1380 registered user. This is also not enough. The relation 3/1380=> 0,2% I think a relation like this you will get in all areas/teams of openSUSE. Now look at this: ubuntuusers.de has 284.412 registered users (http://ubuntuusers.de/users/6052/) If we use the relation also for ubuntu, than there could be more than 500 contributors. (I have not counted them).. That is the reason for the amount of information you can get on the ubuntuuser-pages. But what counts are the registered user 1.380 to 284.412 in Germany. These are only the registered users, not to mention the users, who use the OS without registration. All this users are like ambassadors, spreed the word, how they feel with there OS and like to help. As long as we generate the image, the image how openSUSE is seen from the outside: openSUSE is only for freaks, for developers not for common uses, then we will get lesser interest, lesser contributors, less...... In the sale area counts: A customer is someone, who comes again. If he is satisfied with the product, than he will spreed the word and new customers will come. This works in many areas, not only advertising. And in some areas better than advertising. The product has to speek for itself. This is it, what we have to think about. We have to work on our image and I think not with advertising and ambassador proramms and so on. I think we have to attract people with stability, easy to install, easy update and so on. The OS has simply to work. And the image will change. We have also a lot of software. But no one knows about it. To brows through yast is heavy stuff. And to search on the openSUSE softwarecenter without the name of the package that is needed is also not usefull. Therefor I started two yaers ago in the dewiki the Portal:Anwendungen http://de.opensuse.org/Portal:Anwendungen as a frontend to the OBS softwarecenter for German users, as a structured search platform with information and links to German pages. It is also a center for information about repositories. There are up to 300 hits per day now. I`m proud of. Because of this I know what our users are interested in: 1. grafic cards 2. desktops 3. game 4. Server 5. network wlan 6. video player 7. e-mail 8. audioplayer 9. safety 10 network administration These are the top 10 with more than 15 hits per day. Why grafic cards on place one? You have to go to the forums to get the answer. Best Regards Wolfgang openSUSE Member DE-Wiki-Team -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org