Status of whatcanidoforfedora.org

If you want to contribute to Fedora workstation, and try to find out how to get involved, whatcanidoforfedora.org will point you to the old desktop SIG, which hasn’t existed since 2007.

In an effort to rectify this somewhat embarrassing situation, I filed a PR to have the link updated. That was 3 weeks ago and there hasn’t been a response. Digging deeper, I see that there haven’t been any commits to the repo since May 2020.

Is that site dead? Should it be retired?

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So, this application was maintained by someone who left the CPE team, and for some reason it wasn’t on anyone elses radar. ;(
I’ve brought it up and hopefully we will get some folks stepping up to maintain it and get your PR merged. Sorry about this. :frowning:

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Thanks @kevin !

This is on my backlog. Well, specifically:

image

I think this would be a nice thing for the Join SIG to take over maintenance of (in terms of content), if there are people willing to do that in that group. (I’ll ask.) It could also use some Websites & Apps team love, though, and maybe some Design help (for graphic updates, but maybe also for a visual refresh overall).

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Personally, I’d probably just retire it - fewer moving parts, things to update, etc. But that’s just me.

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I think we’ve (I’ve?) been thinking on the lines of retiring it. The current “Welcome to Fedora” workflow we have is more human contact based and seems to work well enough (we’re always open to feedback on that front), and hopefully we’ll have Easyfix touched up in the future too for those that just want to jump into tasks.

https://pagure.io/fedora-join/Welcome-to-Fedora

I can remember that @hhlp performed some experiment to refresh the content.

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Here is my comment

Regards.,

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I’m hesitant about retiring the site because it is a link that exists in many places, from various wiki pages and docs pages, to the fedora-bookmarks package that populates the default bookmarks in Firefox for new Fedora Linux installs.

I think this could tie into the Websites & Apps Community Revamp on a technology side, but I suspect it will be some time before that team has capacity to pick up the site and modernize. But I think it will be a good candidate for new contributors because there the site is a static site, so there are many options we could look at for improving it or migrating it to something more $POPULAR these days. Maybe Hugo.

In the interim though, I’m not sure what is best to do. A lot of the information is outdated. There is not a clear maintainer or anyone taking ownership of the site. So, even if it functions as a front door to Fedora, it is not a very reliable front door. My feeling is that we shouldn’t jump to scrapping it just yet, but maybe there is a way to encourage a refresh or do some communications to encourage people to update their own SIG, Working Group, or other Fedora sub-group information there.

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@kevin Any objections to letting @hhlp have direct access to commit and accept PRs to just run with it?

Perhaps to @ankursinha’s point, we could make the result be a link to somewhere in Join space. Maybe a doc,or maybe the Fedora Chat channel? Or Discourse discussion either somewhere here, or on Ask. There is On contributing to Fedora (which we could rename… that name kind of sticks out now that we’ve dropped the “on installing Fedora” and “on using Fedora” categories.), or we could make something new.

If we make the target be Discourse, the “End” URL from whatcanidoforfedora.org could be a topic template in the “Pre-fill topic by URL” form, so it would be something like “Hi! My name is _____, and I’m interested in web design!” (or whatever).

@hhlp does a lot of great work for the project! :+1:

I could be persuaded about WCIFF leading to a Discourse topic instead, but I am opposed to it leading to a pre-generated forum template. My initial pathway into Fedora during F20/F21 took me around many of the different parts of the community and across the Wiki. I appreciated being able to take a passive approach to start my Fedora journey first before taking the leap in. WCIDFF was an integral part of me making my first explorations into Fedora.

Eventually, after passively exploring Fedora and seeing what interested me, I decided to work on getting introduced to the community and the areas I was interested in. At that point in time, an intro thread or the Join SIG as it exists today would have been helpful.

But I don’t like the experience for the first interaction with contributing to Fedora to be an immediate introduction. That might work for some people who know their interests and what they want to do, but it would be too intimidating for me when I first began contributing. I would have sought other ways to get familiar with Fedora first before sending an introduction.

Okay, that makes sense. My concern right now is that the site leads to a lot of different project join pages, many of which are actually going to lead to frustration because there’s no one following that process on the page. The hands-on, personal Fedora Join team approach is better.

So, maybe there could be two “exit links” — one that is “Take me to this team’s page so I can learn more” and one that is “I’m excited — help me make introductions!”

What do you think?

I like this idea. :+1:

The “Welcome to Fedora” system takes this into account. For example, if you see what info we give them, it’s exactly the kind of thing one needs to get to “passively” know the community:

https://pagure.io/fedora-join/Welcome-to-Fedora/issue/193

I disagree, but then there’s no “one right way” that works for everyone. The template can easily be edited to say “please go through these links, and when you’re ready, you can introduce yourself to the community”.

This only works if the various teams keep their information up to date—otherwise we get questions in the channels about outdated wiki pages and the sort. So if we’re going down this path, someone needs to either remind teams to update their pages regularly, or needs to constantly curate wcidff to remove inactive team pages and so on.

( The advantage of the human system we have is that a human can tell the newcomer what the status of a team is, and how they can get in touch and so on. )

I like this idea too +1, link to the team page or link to the join team to follow the newcomers workflow and we can add a link to easyfix.

In the right top corner we can add chat.fp.org to talk with human making more personal.

Regards.,

How about we merge this with the easyfix site to have something that points people to the place that they would want to contribute to (easyfix issue tickets) as well as to the place that they would want to be a part of (varied teams - technical and non-technical)?

That way we can ensure that the newcomers who would want to get their feet wet would actually end up having two things - a communication point (say if they are interested in design), WCIDFF can lead them to their chat channels or docs pages as well as some easy-to-do tickets from their namespace.

(Now that I think of it, we can use it to increase the visibility of the Join SIG “Welcome to Fedora” procedure so newcomers would actually know where to land to when they are just starting off - that’s the third thing I guess)

Very true. In the current state, the team has just enough active members to both contribute to the technology, make team decisions and mentor new folks at the same time - so I guess with a solid sketch of what needs to be done with the site and some groundwork with the design etc, I reckon this can even become a candidate mentored project for Fedora.

Now that I’m thinking of it - it might be a while (or a long while, hope not) before we can be in a state to do something about this site, now that the GetFedora refresh’s project management work has kicked off. @thunderbirdtr and @misc, what do you think of adding some basic maintenance and link correction works etc. for your intern this time around?

maybe the Fedora-join channel on chat.fp.o? (otherwise it’s yet another black hole that newcomers will get lost in)

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I’d like to direct some attention to the work being done with the Org Chart- something @thunderbirdtr and @t0xic0der have been working on and call “Fedora Graphs”. Skip to 13:26 if you want to cut to the demo.

I think investing our limited resources into a well defined, easy to navigate, easy to update directory over an application would be wise. I think a directory of this sort would be useful for a much broader audience as well. It would be very useful for the various Outreach teams. This might be a good fit for an internship (cool if there is capacity with upcoming web & apps interns, or a future session would work too)

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I today deployed a new version of https://whatcanidoforfedora.org/, it’s just a version GitHub - fedora-infra/asknot-ng: What can I do for $ORGANIZATION? with PRs that were waiting there for some time.

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