On Mon, Jan 03, 2022 15:04:23 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Mon, Jan 03, 2022 at 02:32:57PM +0000, Ankur Sinha wrote:
I was considering if we really need newcomers to send introductions as part of the welcome to Fedora process to a specific mailing list or forum at all. Folks can just do it on the ticket (most already do), and then once they find where in Fedora they want to start, we usually ask them to introduce themselves on the specific communication channel.
The current template was already modified to say this, and can be further tweaked to say "a list" instead of "the list" etc.:
"Next, when you're ready, could you please introduce yourself (preferably on the list) so that the community can get to know you? (interests, skills, anything you wish to say about yourself really)"
Can we make this be "on the team's mailing list or on Fedora Discussion with the team's tag", with the latter linked to
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/new-topic?category=project&tags=int...
Yeh, something of the lines of "when you're ready, go ahead and introduce yourself to the team". The links we provide in the ticket should have information on where each team can be found.
The introduction task was added there to familiarise folks with the mailing lists, just as the pagure ticket is also intended to familiarise folks with a ticketing workflow.
I continue to worry about moving the Fedora Join channel to Discourse because of the lack of separation between the communication channels for different teams there. The whole point of having a separate one for Fedora Join is to keep it isolated and away from the confusing jumble that is the Fedora community. Having a different category or tag just doesn't cut it. All the content there will still spook newcomers.
Well, let me back up a bit then. What is the list for, and who is it for? We just covered that it shouldn't be for introductions (although like I said, that's mostly what it seems to be). To me, that leaves three possibilities:
Team discussion about the team's process, work, etc. I think this mostly happens in the chat channel, really? But, like, this thread. :)
For this, I think https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/tags/c/project/7/join would really be ideal. (We could even configure the Matrix integration to send new topics to that chat room.)
+1, a place there for our team discussion would work well.
- Announcements of opportunities — this is a whole big topic, but I guess the main thing is I don't see that happening very much here, and also I think it's something wider than just for newcomers. I'm not saying that's not right, just I'm not sure that this is doing it (and I think we actually can do that on Discourse if we want).
I think the idea for this one is that tasks sent here are hand-picked for being ones that newcomers can start their Fedora contributions with, (but it isn't yet automated and there's a whole discussion about Easyfix on discussion.fp.o too.)
That leaves this:
So my worry is that by moving this to Discourse, we become another channel in the jumble there and no longer function as a protected area for newcomers. :/
... which I will take only mock offense at — I've been working hard to make it NOT a jumble! But I do take your point. There's a lot going on. I think it's probably true that a tag isn't enough isolation, but I'm not sure why a category set up to be separate couldn't provide that. But I am a little bit unsure on the _what_ for this — how would that area (or this list even) be different from those welcome-workflow tickets?
The list is just an asynchronous counterpart to the Telegram/Matrix channel because the channels are not/cannot be always monitored. Anything that happens on the channels can happen here. That includes the cases you've covered but with an important addition---it is a dedicated space for newcomers to ask *whatever they wish*. But, it is not like any other community team channel---it is a protected space. "Newcomer? Not feeling confident enough to post to the team's channel? No problem! Post here! We're here specifically to answer your questions!" (Even if people are not using it for this purpose much, we do need to have it in place.)
I don't think Discourse lets us keep this communication channel isolated/protected in the same way. For one, irrespective of whether it is a category or a tag, a user sees posts from *all* of Discourse on their landing page on discussion.fp.o. Even if we send folks to a category/tag, it's really easy to navigate away to other parts of the universe there. So, the excellent navigation features of Discourse are a good thing for users that want to keep up with multiple tags/categories, but not necessarily for newcomers who may find the large amount of info it exposes them to confusing/overwhelming to begin with.
A dedicated limited/filtered "view" that limits newcomers to our tag/category only would be ideal, but I'm not aware of a way that this can be done (without affecting other users and so on).
Neither the list nor the channel are replacements for the "Welcome to Fedora" ticket system. That needs to stay separate because that's the main and only door that we want to funnel people to, and they'll find out about the rest of the community through that process.
PS: one of my few issues with Discourse for multi project/team discussion is that it isn't opt-in in the same way as mailing lists are. Even before I decide to "watch" some and "mute" other things, I'm already seeing everything. I still need to "watch" (subscribe) bits as I do in mailing lists, and additionally, now I also need to spend time on "muting" (unsubscribing) others. I wonder if there is a way of somehow starting with everything muted (a clean slate!) so that I can then unmute/watch only bits I am interested in.