You (probably don’t, but) may remember an idea I posted about a while back when we were just starting to plan out how to reconfigure Fedora’s websites for Fedora.next. I called the idea “Fedora Hubs.”
Some Backstory
The point behind the idea was to provide a space specifically for Fedora contributors that was separate from the user space, and to make it easier for folks who are non-packager contributors to Fedora to collaborate by providing them explicit tools to do that. Tools for folks working in docs, marketing, design, ambassadors, etc., to help enable those teams and also make it easier for them to bring new contributors on-board. (I’ve onboarded 3 or 4 people in the past 3 months and it still ain’t easy! It’s easy for contributors to forget how convoluted it can be since we all did it once and likely a long time ago.)
Well, anyway, that hubs idea blog post was actually almost a year ago, and while we have a new Fedora project website, we still don’t have a super-solid plan for building out the Fedora hub site, which is meant to be a central place for Fedora contributors to work together:
The elevator pitch is that it’s kind of like a cross between Reddit and Facebook/G+ for Fedora contributors to keep on top of the various projects and teams they’re involved with in Fedora.
There are some initial mockups that you can look through here, and a design team repo with the mockups and sources, but that’s about it, and there hasn’t been a wide or significant amount of discussion about the idea or mockups thus far. Some of the thinking behind what would drive the site is that we could pull in a lot of the data from fedmsg, and for the account-specific stuff we’d make API calls to FAS.
Let’s make it happen?
Soooo…. Hubs isn’t going to magically happen like unicorns, so we probably need to figure out if this is a good approach for enabling new contributors and if so how is it going to work, who is going to work on it, what kind of timeline are we looking at – etc. etc. So I’m thinking we could do a bit of a design thinking / brainstorm session to figure this out. I want to bring together representatives of different teams within Fedora – particularly those teams who could really use a tool like this to collaboate and bring new contributors on board – and have them in this session.
For various reasons, logistically I think Wednesday, March 25 is the best day to do this, so I’m going to send out invites to the following Fedora teams and ask them to send someone to participate. (I realize this is tomorrow – ugh – let’s try anyway.) Let me know if I forgot your team or if you want to participate:
- Each of the three working groups (for development representation)
- Infrastructure
- Websites
- Marketing
- Ambassadors
- Docs
- Design
I would like to use OpenTokRTC for the meeting, as it’s a FLOSS video chat tool that I’ve used to chat with other Fedorans in the past and it worked pretty well. I think we should have an etherpad too to track the discussion. I’m going to pick a couple of structured brainstorming games (likely from gamestorming.com) to help guide the discussion. It should be fun!
The driving question for this brainstorm session is going to be:
How can we lower the bar for new Fedora contributors to get up and running?
Let me know if this question haunts you too. 🙂
This is the time we’re going to do this:
- Wednesday March 25 (tomorrow!) from 14:00-16:00 GMT (10-12 AM US Eastern.)
Since this is short-notice, I am going to run around today and try to personally invite folks to join and try to build a team for this event. If you are interested let me know ASAP!
(‘Wait, what’s the rush?’ you might ask. I’m trying to have a session while Ryan Lerch is still in the US Eastern timezone. We may well end up trying another session for after he’s in the Australian timezone.)
Update
I think we’re just about at the limit of folks we can handle from both the video conferencing pov and the effectiveness of the brainstorm games I have planned. I have one or two open invites I’m hoping to hear back from but otherwise we have full representation here including the Join SIG so we are in good shape 🙂 Thanks Fedora friends for your quick responses!
Enabling New Contributors Brainstorm Session http://t.co/O06lEt4MKf
Enabling New Contributors Brainstorm Session: You (probably don’t, but) may remember an idea I posted about a … http://t.co/ASbugh6BkD
Enabling New Contributors Brainstorm Session http://t.co/zSmVOnwsNf via @@mairin
Enabling New Contributors Brainstorm Session:
You (probably don’t, but) may remember an idea I posted about a… http://t.co/g00NQpihud
Enabling New Contributors Brainstorm Session http://t.co/blLeNv58GI via @@mairin
RT @mairin: Enabling New Contributors Brainstorm Session http://t.co/O06lEt4MKf
RT @PlanetFeeds: Enabling New Contributors Brainstorm Session:
You (probably don’t, but) may remember an idea I posted about a… http://t…
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