Re: First time contributors : WAS Re: Marketing Minutes December 13, 2012

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

Yes, volunteer capture was one of the issues.  That's why one of the projects was toe QA our website to make sure that we have a method of doing volunteering capture.

I saw a similar issue in IRC where somebody came in and wanted to hack on something and nobody answered him.  (I was reading from IRC history)  At the very least we should maybe have our bot answer that question on volunteering so they know where to go.

We even have that trouble here in this list.  I know I sent a couple of people here and we weren't quite able to use them because of disorganization.  In order to help with volunteering we kind of have to know what help people need.

Anyways, good observation, Andreas!

sri

On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 5:57 AM, Andreas Nilsson <lists andreasn se> wrote:

On 12/14/2012 07:21 PM, Dave Neary wrote:

Hi,

Sorry I couldn't attend - a sick son & bedtime meant that 8pm yesterday was rush hour in the Neary household.

On 12/14/2012 03:24 PM, Emily Gonyer wrote:

Sri: Theres a common wisdom that GNOME will throw out features and are
unfriendly. We've let others tell our story for us. As a result, most
of the press we receive is negative, focusing on GNOME 3's failures
and shortcomings.

Andreas: Whats the biggest drawback of this perception?

I would say that the biggest draw-back of this perception is that we are not growing as a developer community, because we're seen as a conservative project where code is as likely to be rejected as accepted once the work is done, it's not clear how to get pre-approval before developing something that it'll be accepted.

I can see this and it's something we can improve over time. Related to this (and sorry for hijacking the thread here), is that I think we currently do a very bad job at having a first time contributor experience.
We have https://www.gnome.org/get-involved/ but I feel it's currently pointing to a bunch of loose ends (especially Test and Code).
I was in #gnome-love the other day and someone joined and asked "Hey! I want to start contributing to anything with code! How can I get started?" and I was like "Let me walk you through jhbuild hell...". The whole experience was extremely frustrating to me, I can't imagine how it was for this person.
I know Sri and Colin are looking at OSTree for some of this, but just having the jhbuild documentation sorted out would be a massive help. It's a mess right now.
Also clearer documentation on who to talk to, what to download, etc. would be a massive help.
Dave, since you have experience in this realm, any suggestions on what else we need to do to fix this?
- Andreas
--
marketing-list mailing list
marketing-list gnome org
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list