Tying threads together.

Bill Nottingham notting at redhat.com
Wed Feb 15 18:34:49 UTC 2012


Máirín Duffy (duffy at fedoraproject.org) said: 
> On Wed, 2012-02-15 at 10:00 -0700, Robyn Bergeron wrote:
> > The best way to NOT be a place of permission is to clearly state that 
> > contributors are enabled, how they are enabled, and what resources they 
> > have at their disposal, and make this place of information incredibly 
> > easy to understand, well-known, and obvious to newcomers.  And ensure 
> > that the processes that back up the enablement are just as clear, or at 
> > least, not broken, and have clear owners. And ultimately, make sure that 
> > we are not a place simply of Institutional Memory and the Those Who Know 
> > How, Can.
> > 
> > I think we, the Board, and the wider community, need to tune in the dial 
> > a little bit and focus on usability of our community.  It's not just 
> > "joining the project" -- it's about thriving once you are in.
> > 
> > Anyone know if we're allowed to have a Project Usability FAD? :) (That 
> > was a joke. Just to be clear.)
> > 
> > Thoughts welcomed. (Note: THIS EMAIL IS NOT A DIRECTIVE, just long-winded.)
> 
> AMEN.

<initiatives snipped>

These are all good initiatives. And yet, my only honest response right now
is "sure, that sounds great, and I'd love to see it happen. But I don't have
any time or resources to contribute to this."

And I'm sure that I'm not the only one in this boat. I suspect that overall,
as a project, it's the default attitude. - We don't want to intentionally
discourage people, but we just can't help right now. So we unintentionally
discourage everyone, because even though we tell them they're empowered, no
one really wants to go it alone.

Robyn touched on this - how to state what resources contributors have at
their disposal. But we need to also *have those resources*. How do we create
resources for contributors to have at their disposal?

We tried this in FESCo with the Fedora Engineering Services effort - we'd
have a place where people could file smaller development/packaging
initiatives, and we'd try and match them to people who wanted to help out
with that level of tasks. It has (for the most part) failed.

Now, if we were a real government, we'd institute taxes, and each
contributor would contribute 10% of their time and then we'd have a pool of
resources available for community initiatives. But somehow, I don't think
that would fly.

Bill


More information about the advisory-board mailing list