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

[Andreas Nilsson <lists andreasn se>]

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