Introduction and new, exploring contributors

[Matthew Jadud]

Hello all,

My name is Matt Jadud[1], a member of the CS faculty at Allegheny
College. Since attending a Red Hat workshop on integrating FLOSS and
the classroom[2], I've been looking for more ways to do this in my
teaching. This semester I am leading a course titled "Human Centered
Design," which focuses on interface usability issues.

To kick things off, I had discussed with Máirín the idea that the
students might do some lightweight testing of the upcoming F14 design.
Mind you, they've *just started*, and so the idea with this is to
quickly get a sense for what is involved in going through a testing
process from start to finish. Also, we want our presence here to be
"lightweight," as we know you're busy in the lead-up to R14. Our goal
is to help provide some feedback and testing on the design as it is
progressing.

To that end, the students are working up a list of questions, and our
hope is that we can chat with Mo and (ideally) other members of the
team sometime in the next few days. The goal is to pick three or four
aspects of the design that we can dig into, do some usability testing
on, and provide feedback (quickly) to the community. Our "ask" here is
that you help us make sure that we're looking at parts of the redesign
that will be useful to you -- beyond that, we'll do the work, and
while we hope we do work that is useful and valuable, we have no
expectations that our feedback will necessarily change anything.

We'd love to have any and all who can/are interested to participate in
that conversation.

The wiki page of questions that the student teams are filling out is
here (it should be "done" by the evening of the 7th):

http://wiki.rockalypse.org/HCD/Website_Testing_Resources

and the WhenIsGood scheduler is here:

http://whenisgood.net/4jr8mg

I've joined this mailing list, and will gladly answer questions --
this was a brief intro, and probably leaves more unsaid than said.

Many thanks,
Matt

[1] http://www.teachingopensource.org/index.php/User:Jadudm
[2] http://www.teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_2009

[Jef van Schendel]

2010/9/6 Matthew Jadud <mjadud(a)allegheny.edu&gt;:
>  Hello all,
>
>  My name is Matt Jadud[1], a member of the CS faculty at Allegheny
>  College. Since attending a Red Hat workshop on integrating FLOSS and
>  the classroom[2], I've been looking for more ways to do this in my
>  teaching. This semester I am leading a course titled "Human Centered
>  Design," which focuses on interface usability issues.
>
>  [...] 
Hi Matt,

First off, I wanted to say that this sounds like a really cool idea
for a course. I wish my university did something to work with FOSS
like this. :)

> From your mail I get the impression that you mainly want to focus on
Fedora's website redesign. Is that correct, or are you also planning
to look at Fedora's software (or other apps/parts of GNOME)?

I haven't been a member of Fedora's Design Team for very long yet and
I am only a student myself, but I think usability is a really
interesting subject and I'll gladly help with this project where I
can. I'll keep an eye on what's happening, but feel free to talk to me
anytime. I'm Schendje on IRC. :)

Good luck to you and all the students!

Jef

[Jose Manimala]

Hello Matt,
               This is an awesome initiative and Good luck to you and
your students.

Cheers
Jose

On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 11:31 AM, Jef van Schendel
<jefvanschendel(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  2010/9/6 Matthew Jadud <mjadud(a)allegheny.edu&gt;:
> > Hello all,
> >
> > My name is Matt Jadud[1], a member of the CS faculty at Allegheny
> > College. Since attending a Red Hat workshop on integrating FLOSS and
> > the classroom[2], I've been looking for more ways to do this in my
> > teaching. This semester I am leading a course titled "Human Centered
> > Design," which focuses on interface usability issues.
> >
> > [...]
>
>  Hi Matt,
>
>  First off, I wanted to say that this sounds like a really cool idea
>  for a course. I wish my university did something to work with FOSS
>  like this. :)
>
>  >From your mail I get the impression that you mainly want to focus on
>  Fedora's website redesign. Is that correct, or are you also planning
>  to look at Fedora's software (or other apps/parts of GNOME)?
>
>  I haven't been a member of Fedora's Design Team for very long yet and
>  I am only a student myself, but I think usability is a really
>  interesting subject and I'll gladly help with this project where I
>  can. I'll keep an eye on what's happening, but feel free to talk to me
>  anytime. I'm Schendje on IRC. :)
>
>  Good luck to you and all the students!
>
>  Jef
>  --
>  websites mailing list
>  websites(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/websites
>  


-- 
Kind Regards
Jose M Manimala
http://josemanimala.eu.org/blog
Ph: [phone]

[Jon Stanley]

On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 2:27 PM, Matthew Jadud <mjadud(a)allegheny.edu&gt; wrote:
>  Hello all,
>
>  My name is Matt Jadud[1], a member of the CS faculty at Allegheny
>  College. Since attending a Red Hat workshop on integrating FLOSS and
>  the classroom[2], I've been looking for more ways to do this in my
>  teaching. This semester I am leading a course titled "Human Centered
>  Design," which focuses on interface usability issues. 
This is complete awesomeness.  Note that I'm *not* part of the design
team, I couldn't design my way out of a paper bag if I tried :)  But I
think I can provide a little bit of insight to some of the things on
your class whiteboard in the context of Fedora.  First, judging by the
list that you sent this to and the general gist of things on the
whiteboard, I assume you're talking about website design in
particular, and not the other design elements of the installed
distribution. With that in mind, I can answer a few of the questions
on the whiteboard. Keep in mind that these are my opinions, and others
could have other opinions :).

What tasks do folks need to accomplish?

I think that the majority of people coming to the site are going to
want to see what Fedora can do, sort of like a showcase of sorts. From
there, they should be able to easily download the distribution, and be
able to join as a contributor.

Are there usage stats available?

Not sure what you guys are looking for here, but we do maintain an
awstats instance[1] which should be of some help in this area.

Is the goal to increase the number of contributors?

Indirectly, yes. A recent study[2] of the Fedora community found that
74% of our contributors started out as users. Some salient quotes from
that also explained that these users didn't know that they could
become contributors, I think owing to the fact that they thought that
hardcore kernel development was required or something of the sort -
i.e. an educational problem that it's not widely known that we need
people other than developers to put together a distro :)

Is more support needed for the "onboarding process"?

I think that the answer here is an emphatic YES, but how to exactly do
that is anyone's guess.

>  To kick things off, I had discussed with Máirín the idea that the
>  students might do some lightweight testing of the upcoming F14 design.
>  Mind you, they've *just started*, and so the idea with this is to
>  quickly get a sense for what is involved in going through a testing
>  process from start to finish. Also, we want our presence here to be
>  "lightweight," as we know you're busy in the lead-up to R14. Our goal
>  is to help provide some feedback and testing on the design as it is
>  progressing. 
I can make myself available at the two times that are green in your
whenisgood right now (Tues/Thurs at 8PM), though I'm not exactly sure
how valuable I'd be in that session not being actively involved in the
websites team :)

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/awstats/fedoraproject.org/
[2]
http://www.cyber-anthro.com/beta-an-exploration-of-fedora%E2%80%99s-onlin...

[Máirín Duffy]

On Tue, 2010-09-07 at 00:52 -0400, Jon Stanley wrote:
>  What tasks do folks need to accomplish?
>  
>  I think that the majority of people coming to the site are going to
>  want to see what Fedora can do, sort of like a showcase of sorts. From
>  there, they should be able to easily download the distribution, and be
>  able to join as a contributor. 
The websites team actually wrote up a top ten tasks we'd like users to
be able to do on the website when we first kicked off the project around
F11. (more on the history is here:
http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/fedora-websites-design-status/)

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Website_redesign_2009_requirements#Tasks

~m

[Karsten Wade]

On Tue, Sep 07, 2010 at 12:52:55AM -0400, Jon Stanley wrote:
 
>  This is complete awesomeness.   
Brother Jon speaks my mind, aka, +1.

>  What tasks do folks need to accomplish?
>  
>  I think that the majority of people coming to the site are going to
>  want to see what Fedora can do, sort of like a showcase of sorts. From
>  there, they should be able to easily download the distribution, and be
>  able to join as a contributor. 
I want to offer some ideas of what we want to showcase where it comes
to users *and* contributors.

I have an idea that where a user is going to be happiest is with a
Linux distro that has a community whose values and practices most
closely resemble the user's own.  When it comes to Fedora, I think of
this in my mind as, "Do you mind the occasional bit of masking tape
and unfinished trim around the doorways?  We'll fix it next week, or
certainly by next release!"

Those more comfortable users are, I reckon, more likely to become
participants and contributors ... more likely to hear that increased
on-boarding message and respond to it ... of they already love the
community that makes the distro.

More on the masking tape theory here, with the tape being the way we
marked columns on the walls for scheduling at a FUDCon.

http://iquaid.org/2009/10/30/how-to-choose-a-community-difference-moment/

Is there a way that we can showcase Fedora so that is shows these
values from the community members?

What is missing that should be there?  What content should we focus on
producing?

Is there some clever way to question people and determine how Fedora
could work for them?

I took this the other day ... http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/
... the Linud Distribution Chooser.  I can't be sure how the system
works and what it takes to game it, how accurate it is for people,
etc.  Do I take it as a good or a bad sign that they include "Fedora
Core" in the list if distros they test against?  Their may be
prejudice coded in there, and looking behind the code would be
interesting ... for someone who is not me and can understand what it
is doing and if we can learn from it, reuse it, etc.

>  Indirectly, yes. A recent study[2] of the Fedora community found
> that
>  74% of our contributors started out as users. Some salient quotes from
>  that also explained that these users didn't know that they could
>  become contributors, I think owing to the fact that they thought that
>  hardcore kernel development was required or something of the sort -
>  i.e. an educational problem that it's not widely known that we need
>  people other than developers to put together a distro :) 
We've long presumed that was the case, that people arrive by being
consumers, then participate, then contribute.  We definitely need more
help in attracting the type of users who will have the closest enough
fit with the type of community.

I'm not interested in coding for a stale community type.  This is an
area of social science I don't know a bit about, but I'm curious.  Is
there an urban-type different from a suburban-type and rural-type?
Mountain versus ocean?  What about personal ethics?  Organizational
beliefs?

Seeing as how I seem to see all types across all projects, maybe it is
truly random and the community values don't matter as much in
attracting a well-rounded contributor base.

These are the things I've been wondering about, and they may be still
too esoteric for a class to have anything to do with.  But if there is
something with pondering in the sharing, good.

- Karsten
-- 
name:  Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Community Gardener
team:                Red Hat Community Architecture 
uri:               http://TheOpenSourceWay.org/wiki
gpg:                                       AD0E0C41