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On 08/24/2014 12:35 PM, Eric Griffith
wrote:
Exciting! I'm glad you're making time to participate, but of course school comes first. One minor nitpick, and I won't bring it up again: The convention with mailing lists is to either respond to things inline, like I'm doing here, or to place your full reply below the post you are responding to. It's easier to make sense of a message to read chronologically, rather than read a response then read the message that prompted it after. Not a big deal here, but on some lists you *will* get lectured, every time. Sure, there's no meeting time that works for everyone. You can find us on IRC outside of the meeting time, or on the list - just don't be a stranger! The "Fedora Join SIG" is a specific group that works to help welcome new contributors and find a place for them, and assist other groups in refining their onboarding process. The page is targeted towards people that want to join that group - not really people that want to join the project in general. A lot of wiki pages end up like that; 'internally facing' content whose scope isn't quite clear unless you know the story behind it. An FAS account with a contributor agreement gives you wiki privileges, so you can edit that page to make it more clear. Do be cognizant of the purpose of the page, though, and communicate with those involved to let them know about your work. For the most part, I'd encourage you to be bold and edit freely and responsibly. In this case, since the page represents a group, it would be a good idea to reach out to them for anything beyond minor edits. There's a fedora-join mailing list, if you want to really dig in there. The design team does a lot of the artwork you find scattered around Fedora's sites. I believe they have general design rules and they'd probably help with source files if you wanted to work that way, or they would probably humor requests if you have a project with graphic design needs. For more authoritative information, you should reach out to the design team. I'm sure you'd be welcome there, too. I skim post titles and some content to figure out what the prevalent issues are from time to time, but rarely participate. I've seen Rahul Sundaram there, a longtime contributor, and sometimes Adam Williamson. I know a few folks like Leigh Scott have transitioned to sharing their efforts with the wider Fedora community. Otherwise- *shrug* - you were being rhetorical, right? :) Like I said, it's an area of the community that Docs doesn't really participate in. I'm sure there are a lot of effective tutorials there, and I suspect there are just as many things that I wouldn't feel comfortable recommending to users. Frankly, it gets to be a lot to sift through - and for me, when faced with the choice between keeping up with a meandering 10+ page forum thread and investing the same time into working on documentation that addresses the same problem without discussion, I'm going to be looking for the most effective return (for everyone) on time invested. It's a personal preference, really. It sounds like you like participating there, and that's great. If you're interested, *you* could be the guy on the Docs team that's watching the forums for good content and gathering feedback on our drafts. I disagree here. People go to the forums because they are looking for a social experience. They don't want to dig through documentation to learn the whole system, they want a personalized answer to the specific problem at hand. The documentation we work on doesn't provide an interactive experience like that, and it doesn't always provide ordered instructions for the user's set of tasks for the day - but for the most part, all the answers *are* there for the taking. Forums and mailing lists provide the crucial role of helping people understand how to fit all the pieces together. The difference between the two delivery methods is largely personal preference.
Little to none of Fedora's decision making process takes place on fedoraforums.org . We're all part of the greater Fedora community, but that 's a third party site dedicated to user support. Everything that happens in Fedora is done completely in the open, mailing lists are archived, meetings are logged, discussions are public, announcements provided. Transparency is a *big* priority within Fedora. The delivery method isn't what some might prefer, but there are *lots* of active forums in many languages around the world, and distributing these discussions among them would be a huge effort. It's much more practical to have all this going on in one place. There's some work being done to provide a more forum-like gateway to these discussions that Mairin Duffy has been tracking on her blog[1]. The difference might be that opportunities to make improvements are just as open. It's easy to say "You should do this differently," but not so easy to say "I will make this better," and follow through. Those of us who are 'officially' contributing have made that commitment, and we're glad to see you among us.
[1] http://blog.linuxgrrl.com/category/hyperkitty/ -- -- Pete Travis - Fedora Docs Project Leader - 'randomuser' on freenode - immanetize@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx |
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