December 2010 Fedora Election Plan

[Máirín Duffy]

On Wed, 2010-10-20 at 12:15 -0500, Matt Domsch wrote:
> I'm sensing a growing frustration from some of the people who have
> been heavily involved in Fedora for a long time, a sense of burnout.
> We've all felt it from time to time.  The lack of people stepping
> forward to take on leadership tasks, such as the Spins SIG leader, the
> election coordinator, and similar is concerning to me.  Am I alone in
> this?

I think a big problem is that not all of our processes are documented;
because so many folks volunteer with limited time, it's more efficient
to keep the knowledge in their brains than right out documentation for
how to do it 'just in case' they get burnt out on it one day. New folks
trying to step up though, don't really even know where to start, or who
to ask.

We've recently seen a big uptick in design team volunteers joining in
and taking on tasks, and I don't think it's a coincidence given the
amount of work the team has done in the past couple of months in both
documenting our processes and advertising our needs. It takes me about
twice as long to document a process and blast it out to social networks
and blogs rather than just do it myself, for example, but in the end if
the team gets a new contributor from the documentation, long-term the
effort actually saves time. 

I think if we put together some nice 'job openings' posted for tasks
we'd like new recruits for, and advertise them across the Fedora-related
social network accounts and Planet Fedora, that we might get some more
interest. We should take the attitude that these are great opportunities
for folks new to free software to get involved (and they are, election
coordinator especially as it doesn't particularly require coding chops)
and promote them as such.

~m