RFC: setting up a "Welcome SIG"
Overview: in order to make the Fedora project and community more welcoming and understandable to newcomers, this SIG would seek to identify specific issues newcomers face and develop solutions to those issues - where appropriate, with other SIGs/projects.
This is a request for comments: I think this SIG is well-needed and has a low resource requirement, so the potential impact could be quite large. I appreciate other contributor's ideas and opinions on this. This follows on from my blog post on the subject, 'Fedora Greeters'.
Scope
This project would be community-led, and would seek to address the needs of those new to Fedora: they may be IT-literate or not, they may or may not have experience or expertise with other Linux distributions. The SIG would concern itself with introducing those people to Fedora, the project and the community: attempting to break down barriers that they encounter - we would seek to make their initial transition to using Fedora and interacting with the Fedora community as smooth and straightforward as possible.
Activities
The first thing to do would be to actually gather data about newcomer's experiences with Fedora, so that the immediate pain-points could be addressed. This research would probably need to be designed in conjunction with other teams, as it would be most effective if the data were fed back to others (website, documentation, marketing spring immediately to mind) for them to also act on.
There are some resources, though, that we can likely already say would be useful to have:
- We don't have much in the way of migration resources for users from other common operating systems - Windows XP, Windows 7, MacOS, possibly also Ubuntu.
- There isn't much in the way of "What next?" material
- This was an attempt at that (not sure how successful?) http://fedoraproject.org/en/using/
- A more accessible introduction to the Fedora community and "culture": jargon, expectations, norms.
Necessarily, as well as providing self-help resources, some degree of interactive resource would also be required.