I have stated in the past, and I will stated again, if we start a mentor program, I like to help with it. Hopefully this time it will get off the ground. Pup On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 3:46 PM, Robert Schweikert <rjschwei@suse.com> wrote:
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
All these categories are tied together by one framework that provides the "landing area" for new comers. Additionally there should be a "welcome committee" a group of 2 or 3 people that are willing to show people around and introduce them to the "mentorship framework". The "welcome committee" would also help people figure out where they might fit in to start with and make some kind of introduction to the interest area mentors to basically have a "warm hand off".
That's pretty much the general framework. It's a ton of work but I think it could be successful in capturing the people I think we currently loose. It would also be something to brag about once it is in place and thus help us create mindshare for openSUSE.
Later, Robert
-- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead Public Cloud Architect rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org
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