Hank, thanks for unpacking the ideas about moving on from mentorship. That is a really great rundown.
To not dismiss mentorship entirely, it would be suited to a time-limited event such as ‘Summer of Code’. We could call that ‘Buddy System’ thought.
Speaking of ‘Buddy System’ @ancarrol has some good ideas written up on Pagure. The council closed the ticket and asked them to talk with Join SIG about it. I think we should engage with their ideas. Fedora-Council/tickets ticket #524: Onboarding and Retention
Over the weekend, I reviewed all the ‘Welcome to Fedora’ tickets for the last 8 months. Over that time their have been 49 signups. Issues - fedora-join/WelcomeToFedora - Pagure.io
Extrapolating to the year, that makes around 4 signups per month. From the approx 35 people I contacted, I have recieved 3 responses so far (plus 1 that was already onboard).
I have calculated that we currently have an 4% to 8% retention rate with the current system.
I predict that ‘Monthly Contributor Cohorts’ will have a monthly cohort of 1 to 2 people. Thus rendering the motivation for a group activity moot for the time being.
What do we do then? There are 41 members of Fedora Accounts but I only see around 8 active people in this and associated channels.
What we do is 1) Stick to our current workflow for now. 2) Discuss more outreach or changes to our current workflow.
Is there a group meeting that happens or a key decision making body for Join?
To clarify, monthly new contributor cohorts are not going to work, simply because of the numbers we have at this time. We need to do something else.