SIGs/Join

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Fedora Join Special Interest Group

The Fedora Join Special Interest Group (SIG) aims to set up and maintain channels that let prospective contributors engage with the community. The idea here is to enable people looking to join the Fedora community to converse with existing members, make friends, find mentors, and get a feeling of what and how the community does in general, with a view to reducing the learning gradient that joining a new community entails - and make it more enjoyable!

Mission

Different teams already have different, mostly well documented, SOPs (standard operating procedures) for joining their respective SIG. The infrastructure team is a great example of this. However, we often meet people who are unsure of how their skills fit into the community. We want to provide these people with a channel where they can speak to existing members of the community, learn about what they do and use this information to find the right team to get started with. We help new members form relationships with members; we point them to the right resources - wiki or otherwise; and we expect that this should greatly improve the joining experience.

Goals

1. Set up a communication channel between the existing contributors and prospective contributors. Speaking to current team members is always encouraging. We could even set up a system to send "easyfix" tasks to this mailing list giving folks a chance to work on them and learn in the process.
2. Guide/aid prospective contributors to turn into solid contributors. Rather than just pointing them to join.fp.o, talk to them, see what issues they face, help them decide where they want to get started.
3. To form better mentor-mentee relationships. Here, I mean "mentor" in the real sense of the word.
4. Give prospective contributors a communication channel to converse amongst themselves. This is very important. Take the Google Summer of Code mailing list for instance. It is set up specifically so that the candidates can talk to each other. Since they're all in the same boat, they feel more comfortable discussing certain issues amongst themselves. They'll also be aware of what different people are up to which will give them a better idea of what they can do. It would be great if they could discuss and share the cool stuff they've begun to do. It would surely be encouraging.

Basically, look for potential, not polish. We can help them gain the polish that established contributors have.

Communication

Office hours
You can find us in #fedora-join^[?] (and on the Telegram channel) at these times.

• Mailing list: fedora-join
• IRC: #fedora-join^[?] on irc.freenode.net
• Telegram: https://t.me/joinfedora (this is bridged to the IRC channel)
• Matrix: https://riot.im/app/#/room/%23freenode_%23fedora-join:matrix.org
• Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/fedora

Membership

In general, members of the SIG should be contributors experienced enough to be able to help newbies. So, as a guideline (not a strict rule), we suggest that:

• a SIG member should be part of two other groups (CLA+2)
• active for at least the previous release cycle
• must be subscribed to the mailing list

While we do not usually need to clean up the membership group, we will periodically do so to remove inactive members. This will be done by gathering data from datagrepper on activity.

Please file a ticket on our Pagure instance to apply for membership. The current membership can be viewed in Fedora Accounts here.

Temporary membership for new community members

We also provide temporary membership to newbies just getting started in the Fedora community. This is so that they have access to Fedora infrastructure that requires a CLA+1 (membership of at least one SIG), such as the wiki. This is part of the new workflow for newcomers. Please get in touch with us, and we can discuss about that.

Tasking

We use Pagure to manage tasks we are working on and the issues we need help with. Submit a ticket if you need help from Fedora Join or help us with existing tickets by visiting our repository.

Meetings

The Fedora Join team hosts meetings, sometimes. The next scheduled meeting can be found here. All meetings use the Fedora Join meeting template. Everyone is welcome to attend.

Meeting minutes are logged at Meetbot with links to past meeting minutes below.

• Meetings 2015
• Meetings 2016
• Meetings 2017
• Meetings 2018

Ways to help

• Blogging about Fedora
• Teach classes
• Help people new to Fedora
• Mentor
• Help with issues
• Share ideas to make this SIG, and Fedora, better

User Contributions

Check out some of our user contributions. Got something to share? Let us know.