On 8/25/2014 2:47 AM, Pete Travis wrote:
On 08/24/2014 12:35 PM, Eric Griffith wrote:
Sorry about the delay on this response guys, this week has been the
"Lets get moved into college!" week so: busy busy busy.
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.
Whoopsies! Is this better? Don't want to be accidentally making a faux pas!
I'd have no problem working on the F21 release notes, though one page
I did see that could use some love is actually the wiki page for
joining a Fedora SIG
(https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Join_SIG). There's nothing
majorly wrong with it, just two things I noticed:
1) The artwork on there (no offense meant to Nitesh Narayan Lal)
seems to be using an older version of the Fedora Mascot (Panda? Polar
Bear? Teddy Bear? I never figured out what the mascot was, to be
honest), which makes it look off compared to the artwork on say...
https://fedoraproject.org/en/download-splash
2) Vertically done images that waste content-space, where a
horizontal image set would have fit perfectly.
Now, I'm not claiming to be some great artist or anything like that.
But I can play around with the images in gimp a bit, or if someone
can point me in the direction of the artist that DID the download
splash mascot images I can talk to them and see if they can do
updated-versions of the Join_SIG page.
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.
Oh! Okay! I didn't realize that the page was the specific domain of its
own dedicated SIG. I might play around a little bit but I'll try to not
step on anyone's toes. I'll fire off a few emails to the lists and just
post a heads up. As I said, it was just one thing that struck me as
"odd" or "out of place" when I was combing through the wiki pages on
contributing.
Now onto Pete's question...
How many SIG leaders sit on the forums? Or at least check in? The
ones that do... If you see someone posting a lot of good content do
you reach out to them and offer them to join the SIG? For the Docs
group I would suggest watching for good tutorials, howto's,
troubleshooting steps, etc.
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? :)
For the most part, yes, I was being rhetorical. Rahul and I have talked
briefly on the Phoronix forums, Adam and I a bit more (didn't realize
Adam was so young haha).
My perspective on these messages and topic might need a bit explaining:
I pretty much use 2 distros when it comes to Linux.... Fedora and Arch.
Its no secret in the Linux community that Arch probably has the best
wikis and documentation that are available, better in some ways than
Gentoo. Not all of its good, but a lot of it is very on-point. If you
are looking for content writers, people who are taking the time to write
guides and howto's, the forums might be a good place to check.
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.
You bring up a good point about following threads gets to be a pain, I
completely agree. But if you happen to see the same name pop up again
and again, someone who is doing good quality work on a consistent
basis... A quick private message saying "Hey, I see you doing good work.
The Docs team could use you, even if you just copy-paste the guides to
the Wiki." You might get a new Docs team member out of it. On the same
angle, the person sending the message doesn't have to be -You-
specifically, I would be more than happy to keep my eye on the forums
for those who are posting good content, as I enjoy the "social" aspect
of the forums.
Why are the forums unofficial to begin with? Why is it
forums.fedoraforums.org <http://forums.fedoraforums.org> and not
forums.fedoraproject.org <http://forums.fedoraproject.org>? Users
will use the forums. Users will LOOK for forums for help, not mailing
lists. Mailing lists are good for developers-- people who are
constantly involved with the project. Forums are one-shot affairs,
they ask a question they get an answer, they don't come back until
they have another problem. OR.. Forums are used by those trying to
target the one-shot users. The ones who are writing tutorials and
howto's, the ones who are looking out for the beginner users. Why are
they on the forums? Because they know their audience. They know the
target of their writings are not on the mailing lists, they are on
the forums.
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.
How much of the Fedora design process is done in the open on the
forums? I'm thinking of KDE's recent push with the Visual Design
Group. A lot of work is happening and being talked about on blogs and
such, but a lot is also happening in the Visual Design Group's
dedicated forums. They are engaging users where the users are, and
they are getting feedback. Sure, sometimes this feedback is just
"Yay" or "Nay" but sometimes this feedback is in the form of a
counter-proposal. That person, the one who just drew up a
counter-proposal, they just got introduced to and dipped their feet
into Visual Design. Never know, might inspire them to help out and
contribute more often.
The metaphor and relationship I was trying to create isn't perfect
between the Fedora's Doc SIG and KDE's VDG, but I hope I made my
point with how much of a mirror there could be.
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.
Oh of course, its far harder for someone to actually step up and try to
make things better. I will definitely check into Mairin's blog, it
sounds like a very interesting project.
Out of pure curiosity, I know the forums are third party... but why? Why
were they never made official? Fedora's got the wiki, the docs, the
mailing lists, irc, Fedora planet... but not forums? Just seems like an
odd base to not have covered I suppose.
Not sure if my previous message came through, but does anyone know why
the Documentation link on planet.fedoraproject.org is a dead link?
-- Eric --
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