Wanted to reach out because I saw @hankuoffroad’s post about where the Docs Team is at and wanted to see if the Marketing Team can help with recruiting contributors.
I know that right now a few social media posts here and there may not do much, but I would at least like to do something in this direction as a start to see if we can drum up more interest in contributing to Fedora Docs.
Here are some ideas I have for individual posts:
Intro post to Fedora Docs and what you can find there.
Post about the Docs Team specifically and how it works.
Invitation to join the next meeting or something like that.
Post that’s specifically about how to connect with the team.
Do you guys have ideas on what can be done? Are there other forms of contribution that you’re looking for besides active general contributors? Are there opportunities for smaller, more ‘drive-by’ type of contributions that would go a long way? I guess is this something you’d like to see the Marketing Team work on?
@pboy@jflory7 could you share insights from interactive Docs session from Flock? We could all learn from it and help people motivated for writing and maintaining Docs. Thank you!
Thank you a lot! Unfortunately, in the days before FLock I was too busy with my daily work and additionally prepare everything for Flock. I’ve uploaded my Flock slides to my fedorapeople page.
Unfortunately, the slides only contain the headlines, not all the details I went into. The general diagnosis is: (too) weak linkage of the technical side of the distribution and the documentation of the distribution. Other, successful distributions have solved this better, as I have shown with the simple example of the start pages of Fedora, ArchLinux and RockyLinux (the latter both have, in contrast to Fedora, “documentation” already in a prominent place of the start page).
Improving the structural deficits is probably a project for several years.
In the short term, the strategy is to focus on Quick Docs and encourage our non-developer user base to make quasi-pass-by / “read-by” contributions to Quick Docs articles. At the top of each article there are links to commenting and to the web online editor. Both are easy to use. The goal is for everyone to make it a habit to comment on Quick Docs articles when they see something they’d like to see improved or added, or to change it right away in the web editor.
To this end, “a few social media posts here and there” as you put it, can certainly contribute a lot. And all four of the areas you mentioned are important, in my opinion. I would be happy if we could work together on this. And maybe we can think of more ways to launch such a campaign once we get started.
I’m going to make a ticket in our Marketing gitlab with the ideas to post so that Fedora Docs is in the mix of topics that we post about in the next couple of months. If we have more ideas for posts feel free to pass them along in this thread.
There are a couple of other teams I recommend working with. I would also recommend reaching out to the Podcast Team to record an episode about Docs at some point. You could write an article to go on Fedora Magazine or the Community Blog about something, whether it’s the need the team has or something interesting about Docs that you want to highlight. Both of those things would also get posted on social media, so that’s two more posts right there.
Another idea: running a survey. If you guys run a survey, that’s another excuse to talk about Fedora Docs on social media and you could get helpful data through the survey itself. @bookwar ran the Annual Contributor Survey this year, so she may be able to help with that.
Between these things I think we’d be in a good place to start and see if you feel an improvement as a result. To be honest, I see Fedora Docs as being highly praised in the Fedora and Linux community. Kudos to you for that. However, I think it leads to the unintuitive assumption that the Docs Team is doing great and doesn’t need contributions. We need to challenge that assumption.
If someone from the docs-team is open, the Fedora Podcast is looking for what the next topic will be on the show. Reach out via their matrix channel or here with the podcast-team tag.
We need to challenge that assumption.