Warning: rambling. So, I sit here in the ivory tower of Red Hat, and I wonder... how are we building the community? *ARE* we building the community? I look at the owners.list for extras packages - there are 201 unique owners. Off the top of my head at a glance, 101 of them are recognizable to me. At this stage, I don't venture *that* much off the fedora development lists, or #fedora-devel, or bugzilla for my stuff. And yet, I can easily identify about half of extras contributors? What does that say about how we're growing the community? What does that say about how we enable others to contribute, if most of the contributors are either Red Hat employees, or long-time enough Fedora & Red Hat users that my foggy brain recognizes them? Perhaps it's better in other projects. But I would be skeptical. Which brings up another point - the fact that I don't *know* whether or not it's better in other projects is part of the problem. Here I sit - I'm a member of the board! I've been at Red Hat for umpteen years! And the projects I know about the contribution status of are... Core & Extras. What message does this send? It doesn't matter if it's completely subcionscious - if I, as a board member, only know these things, it implies that Core and Extras are the flagship projects. That they're the only ones with prestige. That if you're contributing to other projects, or you don't feel you have the skills to contribute to Core and Extras, that you're not as important - you may as well not even contribute to Fedora! And that is wrong. It's unfortunately one of the problems we face. The wonders of the open source community (and on-line communities, in general) is that they are theoretically, at least, open to anyone. However, what happens is that communities, when they are open in this way, become self-selecting. I'm not a sociologist, but it's easy to see. The BSG fans congregate together... the soccer players form a club... the people who hack on evolution grab an IRC channel. People congregate with other people of similar interests, where they can post links to the latest whizbang gadgets, discuss their relevant (shared) politics, or kibitz about the movie they all saw last weekend. Micro communities form, and for those who are coming new to the community, without necessarily the full context of knowledge, skills, or interaction... where is there for them? Hence, we end up selecting from the smallest groups of people - those who already are part of the community, but just haven't had the time in the past; those who are parts of similar communities (such as OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, heck, Slackware) who are migrating into our similar community, or those outside the community who are stubborn enough to fight through our ingrained knowledge to contribute. Heck, even this list is pretty damn self-selecting. Let's look at some of our example projects. Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm going to use Extras as an example. After all, we're touting it as one of our most succesful projects. First, on the Help Wanted page. It lists as required skills (emphasis mine): - RPM packaging - General Linux OS knowledge - Familiarity with Fedora Core as a user, sysadmin, and *developer* ... - Programming skills are helpful but *not required* Contradictions are fun. :) If you go to see 'How to become an Extras contributor', you find an 18-step process. Apparently it's 50% more complicated than controlling addictions. Included in this process are: - 7 *other* documents that are described as should-read, - 2 other things that are listed as useful to review - 2 accounts that are required to be created - One account that's required that isn't listed at all (wiki account) - 3 mailing lists that are required - 1 mailing list that's listed as optional Now, if you're coming in, and want to contribute to Extras, is this an inviting environment? Is it welcoming to those who may feel unsure of themselves, or come from cultures where asking lots of questions is not the norm? Compare it to something like the Ambassadors project, which reads: The Fedora Project is always looking for representatives and participants for upcoming Events. Fedora Ambassadors are are people like you and me, who go to places where other Linux users and potential converts gather and tell them about Fedora — the project and the distribution. You can be one too. Which one of these is more likely to garner contributors? Moreover, every time someone has a bad experience trying the first steps to contribute, that consists of a lost opportunity. How many potential contributors have gone away because they were intimidated by our process? Because they were flamed, or told to go RTFM? How many potential contributors are out there that we don't even know how to reach? I'd argue that, realistically, this is our most important task. If we do not develop the community, it does not matter how fast we integrate GNOME. If we do not develop the community, it does not matter if we have booths at Linux shows. If we do not develop the community, it does not matter how detailed our packaging is. Because, if we do not continue to grow the community, others will. And we'll lose developer mindshare. We'll lose user mindshare. We'll lose marketing mindshare. (Heck, some would say we've already lost.) For without a vibrant community, we become Yet Another open source distribution, whether it be Stampede, or OpenSolaris. Right now our community-building seems to be one of waiting. We all go about our daily Fedora business, whether it be documentation, coding, admining, or testing. We wait for people to show up and say "I'd like to help! Here's all this stuff I've done." I don't see how this can possibly scale. And if we continue down this path I don't see how we can possibly succeed. I don't have the answers. I don't know how we're going to solve this problem, (although I wonder if firefighters will be involved). But I know we need to. Bill [For some background reading, check out http://flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D16-Gender_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.pdf It points to one specific segment that isn't represented in our community (only about half the population...)] _______________________________________________ fedora-advisory-board mailing list fedora-advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board _______________________________________________ fedora-advisory-board-readonly mailing list fedora-advisory-board-readonly@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board-readonly