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 :)

I am interested to know more about it.

Cheers Manu On Sun, Dec 1, 2013 at 7:11 PM, Robert Schweikert <rjschwei@suse.com> wrote:

...

On 11/29/2013 07:13 AM, Klaas Freitag wrote:

...

Hi,

since it is right now possible to take a breath between the waves of planning I like to share a thought.

In the last mails we read a couple of good ideas especially around the distro which are worth to think about and act upon. We also seem to widely agree that a bit more "innovation" would be cool.

Topic examples: - Gaming on openSUSE - Clouding with openSUSE - Free Communication, as in "No, thanks, I don't use M$ Skype, but connect my using XYZ on openSUSE". - Documentation ideas - more

All of these ideas would now require more investigation and _work_ to get it into Factory etc. pp. We need experts for each of the topics, which we seem to have, and people who want to learn, help and finally contribute.

I often think that the missing link seems to be that somebody says: "Hey, I wonna work on 'Gaming on openSUSE', this is the rough idea, how about you help me and we have fun on this?" and people who do not feel able to start such a "big" topic themselves but are interested can say: "Well, yes, sure, if there would be a task for me..." That is what worked in the past.

So I wonder if there is anything how we could help this process to work better in our community. These let's call them 'interest-groups' exist, sometimes as one-man shows, but are they visible enough? Can, for example, somebody who would like to spent a little bit of time helping somewhere, find the spots where help is needed? Has ever somebody called for help in openSUSE? How would one do that?

I agree, I think you are poking the finger at a big problem area. New people that want to join our efforts are often overwhelmed and the "jump right in and do it" mentality and confidence that is required with this approach are generally missing.

I've toyed around with the idea of a structured mentorship program and I think it could work. But it requires time and effort for a prime mover and I do not have that time. Neither have I been able to think of good ways to share the load in the initial stages. I believe that once created the program would more or less self sustain.

I actually proposed a (partly) structured mentorship program a few years ago to the board but back then I just got an answer of the type "it is impossible for that to work in openSUSE" or something like

2013/12/2 Manu Gupta <manugupt1@gmail.com>: that. Back then I did not insisted as much as I could because my top priority was the ambassador program. Actually we made a bof in oSC11 with Bruno now that I remember. Anyway if you are interested in a mentoring program maybe we could work together on something. I think I have a google doc somewhere around, if not I can easily write it again. By working together I am talking about all 4 of us +anyone else interesting in something like that. Have fun Kostas

...

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

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Kostas Koudaras - 6:04 3.12.13 wrote:

I am really interested on that, in fact as I thought it for a few days after reading the original mail something like that can be done easily just by organizing an 'interest-groups day' on IRC once every month(or something like that). With the right promotion (articles on news and some social media stuff) many people might be atrracted and it can even bring new contributors to the project. Getting the Project or even the Marketing IRC channel would not be a problem for 24 hours in order to do something like that. In fact something similar(to the structure not to the idea) has ben done before with the Marketing marathons. I think we have the people around in order to do something like that, we can just open a converstion on the project ML in order to find people to kind of 'lead' those teams so that when people show up and they want to work on Clouding for example to know that they should speak to Klaas. Just some of my ideas, let me know yours

I actually attended session by Sirko that was done over Google Hangout. Basically he announced that on some particular time he will be doing the session, shared his desktop, showed us how to do stuff, walked us through some basic examples and than answered the questions or even took a look at what we were doing and helped us when we got stuck. This format was great - more engaging than IRC I would say. Just a little suggestion ;-) -- Michal HRUSECKY SUSE LINUX, s.r.o. openSUSE Team Lihovarska 1060/12 PGP 0xFED656F6 19000 Praha 9 mhrusecky[at]suse.cz Czech Republic http://michal.hrusecky.net http://www.suse.cz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Well, about the mentoring thing I kind of started a G-doc, anyone can access but if you want to edit just ask for access either through the doc or just by mail https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RG7ojHYWbCth2Cs7-7NdqKx2eKMlos_AspV33BgQ... The title is Working with mentors and for now my opinion is keep it that way until we come with something that can be applicable to our community. Learning from mistakes I made in the past titles like 'The openSUSE Mentoring Program' should be avoided, at least for now. About the 'interest-groups' I will come back when I will have something or participate if someone else has something. Regards Kostas 2013/12/3 Joerg Stephan <osml@johest.de>:

...

I actually proposed a (partly) structured mentorship program a few years ago to the board but back then I just got an answer of the type "it is impossible for that to work in openSUSE" or something like that. Back then I did not insisted as much as I could because my top priority was the ambassador program. Actually we made a bof in oSC11 with Bruno now that I remember. Anyway if you are interested in a mentoring program maybe we could work together on something. I think I have a google doc somewhere around, if not I can easily write it again. By working together I am talking about all 4 of us +anyone else interesting in something like that. Have fun Kostas

+1

johest

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2013/12/3 Manu Gupta <manugupt1@gmail.com>:

Hi Kostas,

On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 4:28 PM, Kostas Koudaras <warlordfff@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Well, about the mentoring thing I kind of started a G-doc, anyone can access but if you want to edit just ask for access either through the doc or just by mail https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RG7ojHYWbCth2Cs7-7NdqKx2eKMlos_AspV33BgQ... The title is Working with mentors and for now my opinion is keep it that way until we come with something that can be applicable to our community. Learning from mistakes I made in the past titles like 'The openSUSE Mentoring Program' should be avoided, at least for now.

Thanks a lot for taking the initiative, I really prefer a wiki page than a Google doc for openSUSE purposes, as it is on our repository, can we move this to a wiki

Well I think a google doc can give us a faster workflow...

...

About the 'interest-groups' I will come back when I will have something or participate if someone else has something. Regards Kostas

2013/12/3 Joerg Stephan <osml@johest.de>:

...

...

I actually proposed a (partly) structured mentorship program a few years ago to the board but back then I just got an answer of the type "it is impossible for that to work in openSUSE" or something like that. Back then I did not insisted as much as I could because my top priority was the ambassador program. Actually we made a bof in oSC11 with Bruno now that I remember. Anyway if you are interested in a mentoring program maybe we could work together on something. I think I have a google doc somewhere around, if not I can easily write it again. By working together I am talking about all 4 of us +anyone else interesting in something like that. Have fun Kostas

+1

johest

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On Tuesday 03 December 2013 23:20:55 Manu Gupta wrote:
> Sure, I have no issues with it, but links are usually lost :(
> 
> We have some ideas here also, sharing your opinions here also.
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Mentors was an effort started a long time ago 
- and, like many before and after, died a slow death due to a lack of 
participation.

In our team discussions we spoke about how mentoring is handled in other 
communities - obviously, Tomas knows quite a bit about gentoo. He mentioned 
that active mentoring is a (soft?) requirement for maintainership and that is 
not a crazy idea.

I would like to point out that plans, proposals, wiki pages and google 
documents have done anything in the past three years.

Perhaps we should ask: how can we reward people for mentoring, and how can we 
encourage them?


About the idea that it can probably sustain itself, as Robert noted: that 
would be awesome but at least my experience is different. As the ambassador- 
and marketing programs have shown, when a few key people put in lots of 
energy, a huge multiplication effect can follow. See the statistics I shared. 
Once the key people go away, things fall apart. In the ambassador program, the 
sending of materials and the engagement on the mailing lists and IRC channels 
were instrumental in the building of the program. Without that, it fell apart. 
And honestly, that is not unsurprising - it happens more often than not.

/J
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Le 09/12/2013 10:36, Wolfgang Hahnl a écrit :

And who should find this page? There is no link to this page. I have added a link from http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Teams and some introduction. But it would be better ift each team makes a remark on its team page who is a mentor.

thanks. anyway, we have to revive all the marketting system, including mentorship, Isabel launched a discussion on the marketting list, and I think it's the place to do this (not to add an other discussion on the project list) if anybody here wants to help marketting, please answer on the marketting list thanks jdd -- http://www.dodin.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Monday 09 December 2013 11:31:37 Henne Vogelsang wrote:

Hey,

On 08.12.2013 21:33, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

...

As the ambassador- and marketing programs have shown, when a few key people put in lots of energy, a huge multiplication effect can follow. See the statistics I shared. Once the key people go away, things fall apart.

Any project that nobody is willing to put an effort to will never happen or die. That is a good thing! As this leaves only the stuff that someone really want's.

Don't propose it, do it...

You assume all people have the drive you do. I wish that were true ;-) The reality is that plenty of people are willing to help out, but need to be nudged in the right direction. I don't mean told what to do, but suggestions and calls for help or action do get lots of response - by people who would simply not have done much without those. This is how collaboration works, of course. I don't think this means the things nobody pushed for are not worth doing, just that - nobody pushed for it. Yet, with some pushing, lots of people would've cared. And yes, there are downsides to this too - perhaps it makes people sometimes expect that somebody pushes, so they don't. By the way, the discussion on the marketing ML makes me very happy :D /J

Henne

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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

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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

Le 05/12/2013 21:47, Robert Schweikert a écrit :

On 12/05/2013 12:10 PM, Wolfgang Hahnl wrote:

...

easy to install,

check,

this will never be more than it's already, that is easy if it's the only OS in board, doable in the other situations - being more precise is for an other thread and we know the competition will do all to make this worst the only solution should be pre-installed computers... jdd -- http://www.dodin.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hello, Am Freitag, 6. Dezember 2013 schrieb Wolfgang Hahnl:

Am Donnerstag, 5. Dezember 2013, 15:47:00 schrieb Robert Schweikert:

...

Of course you should not use "search" and our wiki in the same sentence as our wiki search is abysmal ;) .

I know. But i'm tough enough.

There's still hope ;-) [1] I sent a proposal (on the opensuse-web mailinglist) to search most namespaces by default, with search results boosted[2] depending on the namespace. Until now, the proposal in general got positive feedback (with small details still to be fine-tuned). The wiki server admins from Provo also stated that they are willing to implement what we decide, so there's still hope for a better search ;-) Regards, Christian Boltz [1] even if my random sig might indicate something else ;-) [2] "boosted" means to influence the sort order, so matches from the main and portal namespace will have best chances to be top search results - except if another namespace has a much better match ;-) -- Alles wird gut. Nichts wird besser. :-) [Ratti in fontlinge-devel] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org