Fedora-Council/tickets ticket #524: Onboarding and Retention

[t2dbot (Tickets to Discussion Bridge)]

@ancarrol filed Fedora-Council/tickets ticket #524. Discuss here and record votes and decisions in the ticket.

Ticket text:

@@ancarrol

Looking at the current process here: Welcome to Fedora! :: Fedora Docs

I had some thoughts on ways to improve the onboarding experience and I have outlined them below. I’ve sanity checked this with some community members who liked it and encouraged me to submit this ticket ahead of the upcoming F2F as it may be a useful topic of discussion.

• The person looking to join makes a ticket/reaches out to a dedicated medium. This ticket/channel asks for their timezone, and based on this, a community member is assigned to be their onboarding buddy.
• The buddy answers the ticket, and between them they pick a time that works best for both parties to join a real time communication medium of their choice. A 2hr timeslot should be sufficient. (Jitsi, Matrix, etc).
• They can work through the vital onboarding pieces together, such as making a Fedora contributor account, welcome to Fedora intro ticket and showcasing the type of SIGs available to join and adding them to required chatrooms/tools.
• Once a SIG(s) have been picked, the buddy can update their ticket with any necessary requests for certain FAS User Groups.
• The new member can ask questions on their ticket and the buddy will answer them. (no limit).
• This buddy is responsible for checking in with the person each week for a total of 4 weeks to see if there is anything else they need. (45min slot for this, picked by both parties).
• If no replies in 4 weeks, or if the new member confirms they are up and running, this initial intro ticket is closed.
• Ticket transitions from “Intro” to “Retention”.
• Buddy checks in with the new person on the retention ticket once per month for 5 months, and/or responds to any questions posted there by the new member.
• 6 months from start to finish, the person is considered successfully onboarded.

Admin notes:

• Total dedicated time per buddy per new person is 5hrs over the first 4 weeks, and approx 10hrs in total over 6 months.
• Rotation of buddies per timezone can be set up after seeking volunteers.
• Badges to incentivise buddies; 1, 3, 5, 10, 25, 50 & 100 Contributors Onboarded.
• Potential priority for highly contributing buddies to be funded part or in full for community in person events.

An example of a ticket from the current process, that at least on public appearance, appears to be stalled/inactive can be found here: Issue #44: Welcome to Fedora @nayaksatya4332! - WelcomeToFedora - Pagure.io

[theprogram (MatH)]

I am thinking about ‘joining’ Fedora. At some point, you will have to ‘onboard’ me. With this in mind, I have a couple of notes.

With regard to the ‘stalled’ ticket posted: the user did not really know about Fedora, offered 15hrs per week volunteer time and thought it would be a good place to start (their career?). This ticket stalled not because of the on-boarding process, but because the user had unrealistic expectations and a lack of knowledge.
In the FOSS and Linux community, like at University, the ones who make it are great at self starting and research. The information about Fedora SIGs and what Fedora does are things that should be researched independently and prior to ‘on-boarding’.

Regarding the ‘buddy’ system proposed. I think it has proposed a lot of time dedicated to actions that should be taken independently by new users.
The synchronous ‘time-zone’ requirement and online meeting are not a good fit for sometimes late-night reclusive persons. For others it may work well.
Having on-boarding done by a group means backups and redundancy. It means asynchronous communication is timely.

What I as a user would prefer is to be able to talk with people in the SIGs I am interested in as fast as possible - after having proved that I have some relevant skills or knowledge.

This is a good area to talk about though. I would like to see documentation on the SIGs and networking opportunities highlighted and/or rewritten.

[ankursinha (FranciscoD)]

The buddy system would be great to have, but it has just never happened. We’ve never managed to have any sort of mentoring in Fedora where newcomers are connected to existing contributors who then actively “look after” them. We seem to always lack the human resources to do so. I’d be jubilant if someone wants to try this again—it’ll really help with onboarding.

The ticket system is meant to help with this—all newcomers + join sig members get notifications from these welcome to Fedora tickets. So, the idea is not to have one single point of contact (or failure), but instead let “everyone talk to everyone”. We respond to tickets, but we do not check on people regularly any more. We’ve done this in the past where one of us has gone through all the tickets and commented on them asking how people are doing and so on. That’s what the “status check” flags are for. (I don’t have data on this, but it didn’t seem like this increased participation significantly. In some cases, it felt like we were pushing people and they’d reply apologising for not being able to volunteer etc., and that didn’t feel quite right). If we have more people to help (human resources are again the bottle neck here), we could start status checks again.

There’s also an idea to start monthly cohort meetings for newcomers, but it needs more people to help:

https://pagure.io/fedora-join/Fedora-Join/issue/291

The particular ticket you have noted did get a response, but on the mailing list:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/fedora-join@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/EJF27YHWQIHXFGLNXWYWX4BCP3M4C2OB/

(not sure why it doesn’t show my reply in the thread directly).

We just forgot to update the ticket. I’ve done that now.

TLDR: the issue isn’t a system/pipeline—it’s the lack of human resources to actively engage with newcomers.