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

2012-12-15 Thread Andreas Nilsson

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

2012-12-15 Thread Sriram Ramkrishna
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 li...@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/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-**listhttps://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list

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