NOTE: I had not previously heard of the “We Make Fedora” saga until after I created this
Why
Easyfix is RIP
Ask Not is effectively RIP (terribly outdated)
Easyfix was IMO the wrong way to solve the right problem:
People need to see a connection from “skills I have” (or want to practice) to “things I can do”. Ask Not is / was great here.
Once newcomers are convinced that they are capable of contributing, they benefit greatly from having a specific task they can get their hands around while they learn the ropes.
We do not write every Issue / Ticket as though a newcomer is going to tackle it. That would be exhausting. Every Issue we write assumes a lot of context in someone’s head.
Instead, some curation and targeted extra explanation can have a high impact on recruiting / retention.
While onboarding I made a very long list of possible TODOs for myself, and this site eases my guilt about deleting most of them.
Future:
I’m hoping that others around the project (@pboy? @madelinepeck?) may be willing to curate some “easyfix” tasks to add here, especially in spaces I don’t frequent. It’s admittedly a lot of work even just to write down the things that we want, but I believe it can be extremely successful in bringing in new contributors. If you have more ideas than time, put them in this thread and maybe we can swarm on getting them written up.
Suggestion: Join SIG could determine who the regular points of contact are across the Fedora project in each work area and periodically meet with those people (once a month?) to keep this site updated.
If this has legs for more than a few weeks, then it should probably move to a Fedora git space and Fedora infra.
Maybe we can merge this concrete list with Ask Not at some point, if that site ever gets revitalized?
I wasn’t planning to put a ton of time into this, it just seemed like a quick & obvious need. So if someone wants it to be internationalized / etc, the PRs are open.
We’d (I’d?) love to do this, but it hasn’t happened because we don’t have enough people/human resources. (The common issue is lack of time from the humans—it’s relatively easy to set up all of these web resources, but finding the time to liaison with various teams regularly to keep them up to date has always been the challenge—both from the join SIG side of things, and from the teams we want to communicate with.)
If there are a couple of folks that are happy to lead this, please comment here and the rest of us can rally around to help. It does need a couple of people who will focus on this and take ownership of the task/project.
Thanks . And some context for others reading this thread (possibly in the future): there is a project listed on imakefedora to improve Noggin’s UI for new users.
I did eventually figure out what all those links were for, but:
Explanations / links to explanations should be in Noggin itself.
It should hide any links that we know will just be 403 anyway. (Noggin knows that the user has no groups.)
Would you (or someone else from Join SIG) be willing to write this up as a project listed on imakefedora? Or at minimum, can someone from Join nominate themselves to be the listed Matrix point of contact for it, and I’ll write it up when I get some free time?
I can nominate myself to cover some areas. I’ll coordinate that in Matrix.
Maybe a good time to think about what other projects we could put up there for Join work?
I would have liked to see ‘easyfix’ resurrected and updated. With a new website there is now another job looking after it. I think easy to edit wikis are great.
I would like to see Ask Not fixed, as it is not dead, just outdated.
Considering that human resources are the problem, keeping things as simple as possible is super important. My favourite line from philosophy is Ockham’s Razor, “Don’t multiply entities beyond necessity” often summed up as “take the simplest route”.
The kind of regular long term work that it will take to manage an ‘easyfix’ site - even if it is once a month - is say an hour per team, and with say 20 teams, that’s 5 hours a week to keep this coordinated in the long-term.
Personally, I’m wary of taking on (non-paid) jobs that I might not be able to continue with. It could be a really interesting job, talking with many teams and getting to know many people - or it could be chasing down and hassling people to do their administration for them - probably a mix of both. As a paid job, APS 3 (Australian Public Service), as a free job … a lot of commitment.
I don’t disagree at all with the need or usefulness of the contents of imakefedora.
I currently see several stale PRs out there, and it certainly seems abandoned / extremely low priority.
I can inquire about becoming an owner / maintainer for the site, though the infra permissions structures generally require me to become a full infra admin which might have some hurdles.
If I’m going to be the (solo?) maintainer of the concrete list of newbie work, I definitely won’t have time to do anything else for Ask Not besides review PRs from others.
Ask Not doesn’t focus on providing a clearly accessible list of work (even though it does eventually get around to suggesting some concrete work in some work areas through the wizard flow.)
I believe that the list of work needs to be clearly accessible (and directly linkable!) for those who already understand that the answer to “Can I contribute?” is “Yes!”.
Moving this list from imakefedora to Ask Not is another decent-size body of work, mainly because it’s not immediately clear how that content should integrate, and I won’t have any additional capacity until after the data lake is further along. That said, if I can get access per #1 above then maybe some plucky web designer / PM wants to sort this.
Agree! Though the essence of simplicity is essentially “full alignment to goals”, and I believe that Ask Not and imakefedora currently focus on facilitating two different onboarding / recruiting goals.
Nobody lives forever . Everyone knows that here. My $0.02 (regarding this or any other project): if you think it might be interesting and worthwhile then do it until you can’t, or until you just don’t want to anymore. You don’t owe anyone anything, and no lives hang in the balance.
My ask for those active in Join SIG is simply:
Refer new users to imakefedora when you think it might be helpful.
Let me know if you observe any obvious wins or gaps. If I don’t have time to address the gaps now, they’ll get documented for when I or someone else does.
I think commitment is really important. If someone takes it up, runs it for three months, then leaves - then there is another abandoned system. It is my duty to provide a consistent future road-map and actionable plans. Lives do hang in the balance in open source and technological infrastructures.
I don’t think you should take on the role single-handedly. You are too talented to have this amount of spare time for very long.
But I don’t want to be too negative - if we can find a small team willing to take this ‘easyfix’ or ‘imakefedora’ on, it will be such a positive to the future of Fedora.
On a glance, I cannot help but be reminded of the likes of Easyfix and AskNot-Ng projects with similar (in spirit) objectives of funnelling in contributors to get started with some tangible tasks to work on. That is not to say that I do not like the work put in here - I love how it goes in detail about the requirements, commitments, competencies and instructions, rather than letting folks figure those out by themselves. I do worry about the longevity (in utility) of a project like this because having worked previously on bringing both Easyfix and AskNot-Ng back to life some years back, I realized that it is less of a technical problem (i.e. I have not yet met people who say that cannot contribute because Fedora Project lacks a good first issue aggregator) but more of a human problem (i.e. Even if there is a good first issue aggregator, there is some (or more) work involved in listing them over there).
One might ask themselves then - If listing a good first issue over there amounts to equivalent (or more) efforts than to fix them, how does the aggregator help the maintainers? If anything (speaking from experience), I see more value in the @ankursinha’s established “Welcome to Fedora” workflow of organically meeting people before writing codebases (or any other field of contribution). Back in the Fedora Websites and Apps Community Objective days, we have struggled with expending valuable time in mentoring driveby contributors, which we could have actually spent in (and later, we DID spend in) improving our documentation. Such aggregation has been done before as it is self-contained (if not easy) to develop it but having people adopt it on the long run and giving it the visibility that it needs to actually end up being effective can be one heck of a challenge.
To explain how the Fedora world looks through my eyes, I’ll be a bit more personal than I usually am on here.
I’m someone with a fairly generalist tech skillset. I wouldn’t claim deep expertise in any area, but generally I can figure things out and can get them done.
I generally do fine collaborating with others on a concrete task. But more “generic”, non-task-focused, social interactions and relationship building tend to be a struggle for me.
So the existing ways into Fedora looked pretty daunting to me.
Ask Not is a nicely done website, but it feels like the target audience is people who are confident about their expertise in a particular area and how they deploy it. Declaring myself ready to contribute in a particular area would generate quite some impostor syndrome[1].
The Join SIG workflow is well intentioned and has clearly had plenty of thought put into it. But there’s still a lot of emphasis on getting onto Matrix, introducing yourself and initiating conversations with other teams. This feels quite draining because for a newcomer coming to Fedora Matrix, there’s a substantial “hidden curriculum” of Fedora culture, terminology and assumptions that they don’t yet have. I look at that and expect that the interactions I need to have before contributing are going to be difficult and awkward.
For me those difficulties would be greatly short-circuited by being able to read about what a team is concretely looking for help with before initiating the interactions. Then the “how about I join you on this?” conversation has a lot more context and is more comfortable.
As you say:
Don’t underestimate the value of this! For at least some potential contributors, this is super-important and makes the difference between someone dipping their toe in and eventually becoming an ongoing contributor, versus never feeling like they can take the first step.
Now, ultimately I got in through a different pathway. The Docs team reached out to me based on my posting here on Discourse[2] and MRs that I’d submitted. So for me personally it got sorted.
Of course I’m not trying to say the process should have been tailored for me. Rather, I’m assuming that there are others like me in a similar situation - which of course is just an assumption. But we should also bear in mind that by definition, we don’t know very much about people who might have contributed to Fedora and didn’t. Of course, if you’re a current established contributor, then the existing recruitment process must have worked out fine for you. But we should have our eyes open for who we might be missing.
I don’t love using the word ‘syndrome’ for a folk-psychological concept, but I don’t think any other phrase is so well recognised. ↩︎
We should encourage this too! If you see that someone here seems to have interests that would fit your team, drop them a message! ↩︎
This is again a chicken and egg problem. If one needs to know what a team is doing, one needs to interact with the team. One needs to know what a team is doing to figure out if they should interact with the team.
The way the Welcome to Fedora workflow tries to work around it is: let’s not focus on contributing, let’s try to get to know people; once one gets to know a few people, the conversations then provide information on what these people and the teams that they are involved in are doing.
I.e., we don’t focus on tasks at all. We want people (at whatever experience levels, and with whatever skills) to just hang out—that’s enough to become part of the community. Then, people can go explore more specific teams based on their interests.
This works well for people with no FOSS contributing experience because it helps to make the learning curve less steep. For people that have prior experience, we assume that they are able skip steps in the process and are able to figure out what needs doing without necessarily doing the guided exploration that the process tries to provide.
My personal view is that some interaction with people is a necessity. We are not set up as a community where all our tasks are well defined—we simply don’t have the structure. Further, as volunteers, our community has quite a high turnover—people come and go all the time—which means others are constantly picking up threads here and there. This makes a formal sort of system where all tasks are listed with statuses and metadata even harder to implement. (I’m not saying it cannot be done, but it is work, and most people I know prefer to spend the limited resources at their disposal doing the work instead of on organisational tasks).
There are lots of personalities in open source . I think that there are likely as many “best approaches” to recruiting as there are personalities.
The current people-first approach is likely great for some, but it wasn’t for me. I had only a few hours I could commit, and I was eager to dig into the work. But my availability was on weekends and in a slightly “wrong” timezone. My only options were to:
Resign myself to asking a question today, and maybe I’ll get an answer between this weekend and next weekend.
Note: if excitement is a precious resource, then this is a great way to waste it.
Figure it all out myself.
Which bypasses all of the people-oriented goals of the current onboarding process anyway.
These problems would be much exacerbated if I was in an extremely-wrong timezone, which I don’t like the implications of.
My thought is that providing a small pool of “prepped” technical work will allow people to dive directly into solving a problem and allow them to use their time in the way that they wanted. They will eventually need to connect with the community to get that work merged / deployed, but that can happen after they have mentally engaged with the problem and invested themselves in the solution. After they have found some success to be proud of. And by that point they will have provided themselves with some of the necessary context to move onto the next project / task, without requiring so much prep. (And likely requiring more conversation.)
So, having a pool like this doesn’t diminish the “human connection” aspect of the project, it simply removes it from being a blocker to someone’s first contribution. I guess my general theory is that we should hook people the way they want to be hooked, and then they’ll stay hooked.
Yes, exactly. But not because copy-paste is hard, but because recruiting success requires that we provide more context for newcomers than the average easyfix ticket did.
At an individual level, it doesn’t! It’s flat-out more work.
At a project level, even legendary maintainers retire eventually. A project that isn’t successfully and continually recruiting is a project that is already dead on its feet.
I stumbled over this link https://firstcontributions.github.io/, we might should make a link to Fedora/Imakefedora from there.
As I could see it is still missing the connection to us.
Definitely! If you stumbled across that site then others will too. Good find!
I’m not sure what the right link is, though.
Asknot is perhaps canonically the right place to send newcomers, but its in such poor shape currently that I don’t recommend it. (Dead links, retired initiatives, etc.)
I think imakefedora is much more in line with what that site is trying to accomplish (and possibly more aligned to the git-oriented audience there), but so far nobody else has agreed to contribute to it and I’d classify the reception on this thread as “lukewarm at best”. So its future is dependent upon my time alone.
That really only leaves two choices, both landing in docs:
I have mixed feelings about sending people here as their first stop. I don’t think most people come to Fedora to join JoinSIG. But it is undeniably good to get them connected to JoinSIG right away. (I think we need to accomplish that elsewhere.)
I was checking “Clemens Lefebvre” s personal git repositories (Linux Mint Project Leader) … so you see every project is suffering from the same as we do.
It might would be a good idea to create some “investment-font” for free lancers. To “support them to support” … what a sentense
It is not working, to optimize a Opensource Project, sell it expensive while laying of a good part of the staff. This is tearing apart everything and all this helping hands will be missed. Old stable structures and Networks fall apart and have to be crated new. This might be also a reason why we do have so many (old) semi abandoned pages for searching help
Your approach with the imakefedora site is nice and the most actual one I guess. Do not give up Might be a good idea just also mention a link section to all the other (outdated) options. Then the user/helper will decide on its own what is best.
I got attracted because of the “theme for Hugo pages” entry. Still in the beginning, and gasping for spare time to do more.
Might be a good idea just also mention a link section to all the other (outdated) options. Then the user/helper will decide on its own what is best.