Fedora Join Special Interest Group
The Fedora Join Special Interest Group (SIG) aims to set up and maintain channels that let prospective contributors engage with the community. The idea here is to enable people looking to join the Fedora community to converse with existing members, make friends, find mentors, and get a feeling of what and how the community does in general, with a view to reduce the learning gradient that joining a new community entails - and make it more enjoyable!
Mission
Different teams already have different, mostly well documented, SOPs (standard operating procedures) for joining their respective SIG. The infrastructure team is a great example of this. However, we often meet people who are unsure of how their skills fit into the community. We want to provide these people a channel where they can speak to existing members of the community, learn about what they do and use this information to find the right team to get started with. We help new members form relationships with members; we point them to the right resources - wiki or otherwise; and we expect that this should greatly improve the joining experience.
Goals
- Set up a communication channel between the existing contributors and prospective contributors. Speaking to current team members is always encouraging. We could even set up a system to send "easyfix" tasks to this mailing list giving folks a chance to work on them and learn in the process.
- Guide/aid prospective contributors to turn into solid contributors. Rather than just pointing them to join.fp.o, talk to them, see what issues they face, help them decide where they want to get started.
- To form better mentor-mentee relationships. Here, I mean "mentor" in the real sense of the word.
- Give prospective contributors a communication channel to converse amongst themselves. This is very important. Take the Google Summer of Code mailing list for instance. It is set up specifically so that the candidates can talk to each other. Since they're all in the same boat, they feel more comfortable discussing certain issues amongst themselves. They'll also be aware of what different people are up to which will give them a better idea of what they can do. It would be great if they could discuss and share the cool stuff they've begun to do. It would surely be encouraging.
Basically, look for potential, not polish. We can help them gain the polish that established contributors have.
Communication
- Mailing list: fedora-join
- IRC: #fedora-join on irc.freenode.net
- Webchat: #fedora-join[?]
Meetings
The Fedora Join team hosts bi-weekly meetings. The next scheduled meeting can be found here. All meetings use the Fedora Join meeting template. Everyone is welcome to attend.
Meeting minutes are logged at Meetbot with links to past meeting minutes below.
Tasking
We use Pagure to manage tasks we are working on and issues we need help with. Submit a ticket if you need help from Fedora Join or help us with existing tickets by visiting our repository.
Ways to help
- Blogging about Fedora
- Teach classes
- Help people new to Fedora
- Mentor
- Help with issues
- Share ideas to make this SIG, and Fedora, better
Members
User Contributions
Check out some of our user contributions. Got something to share? Let us know.