New member

[Pete Travis]

On 08/24/2014 12:35 PM, Eric Griffith wrote:
> Sorry about the delay on this response guys, this week has been the
> "Lets get moved into college!" week so: busy busy busy.
Exciting! I'm glad you're making time to participate, but of course
school comes first.

One minor nitpick, and I won't bring it up again: The convention with
mailing lists is to either respond to things inline, like I'm doing
here, or to place your full reply below the post you are responding to. 
It's easier to make sense of a message to read chronologically, rather
than read a response then read the message that prompted it after.  Not
a big deal here, but on some lists you *will* get lectured, every time.

> I shall look over the 'reading material' above and take it to heart.
>
> I can hop on IRC no problem, the only issue I might have is the
> meetings unfortunately. I'm on USA Eastern which puts the meeting at
> 0900-- right in the middle of one of my classes. If there's minutes
> posted afterwards I can definitely look over the minutes and take note
> of anything that came up however.
 Sure, there's no meeting time that works for everyone.  You can find us
on IRC outside of the meeting time, or on the list - just don't be a
stranger!

>
> I'd have no problem working on the F21 release notes, though one page
> I did see that could use some love is actually the wiki page for
> joining a Fedora SIG (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Join_SIG).
> There's nothing majorly wrong with it, just two things I noticed:
>
> 1) The artwork on there (no offense meant to Nitesh Narayan Lal) seems
> to be using an older version of the Fedora Mascot (Panda? Polar Bear?
> Teddy Bear? I never figured out what the mascot was, to be honest),
> which makes it look off compared to the artwork on say...
> https://fedoraproject.org/en/download-splash
>
> 2) Vertically done images that waste content-space, where a horizontal
> image set would have fit perfectly.
>
> Now, I'm not claiming to be some great artist or anything like that.
> But I can play around with the images in gimp a bit, or if someone can
> point me in the direction of the artist that DID the download splash
> mascot images I can talk to them and see if they can do
> updated-versions of the Join_SIG page.
>
The "Fedora Join SIG" is a specific group that works to help welcome new
contributors and find a place for them, and assist other groups in
refining their onboarding process.  The page is targeted towards people
that want to join that group - not really people that want to join the
project in general.  A lot of wiki pages end up like that; 'internally
facing' content whose scope isn't quite clear unless you know the story
behind it.

An FAS account with a contributor agreement gives you wiki privileges,
so you can edit that page to make it more clear.  Do be cognizant of the
purpose of the page, though, and communicate with those involved to let
them know about your work.  For the most part, I'd encourage you to be
bold and edit freely and responsibly.  In this case, since the page
represents a group, it would be a good idea to reach out to them for
anything beyond minor edits. There's a fedora-join mailing list, if you
want to really dig in there.

The design team does a lot of the artwork you find scattered around
Fedora's sites.   I believe they have general design rules and they'd
probably help with source files if you wanted to work that way, or they
would probably humor requests if you have a project with graphic design
needs.  For more authoritative information, you should reach out to the
design team.  I'm sure you'd be welcome there, too.
>
>
> Now onto Pete's question...
>
> How many SIG leaders sit on the forums? Or at least check in? The ones
> that do... If you see someone posting a lot of good content do you
> reach out to them and offer them to join the SIG? For the Docs group I
> would suggest watching for good tutorials, howto's, troubleshooting
> steps, etc.
I skim post titles and some content to figure out what the prevalent
issues are from time to time, but rarely participate.  I've seen Rahul
Sundaram there, a longtime contributor, and sometimes Adam Williamson. 
I know a few folks like Leigh Scott have transitioned to sharing their
efforts with the wider Fedora community. Otherwise- *shrug* - you were
being rhetorical, right? :)

Like I said, it's an area of the community that Docs doesn't really
participate in.  I'm sure there are a lot of effective tutorials there,
and I suspect there are just as many things that I wouldn't feel
comfortable recommending to users.  Frankly, it gets to be a lot to sift
through - and for me, when faced with the choice between keeping up with
a meandering 10+ page forum thread and investing the same time into
working on documentation that addresses the same problem without
discussion, I'm going to be looking for the most effective return (for
everyone) on time invested.  It's a personal preference, really.  It
sounds like you like participating there, and that's great.  If you're
interested, *you* could be the guy on the Docs team that's watching the
forums for good content and gathering feedback on our drafts.

> Why are the forums unofficial to begin with? Why is it
> forums.fedoraforums.org <http://forums.fedoraforums.org> and not
> forums.fedoraproject.org <http://forums.fedoraproject.org>? Users will
> use the forums. Users will LOOK for forums for help, not mailing
> lists. Mailing lists are good for developers-- people who are
> constantly involved with the project. Forums are one-shot affairs,
> they ask a question they get an answer, they don't come back until
> they have another problem. OR.. Forums are used by those trying to
> target the one-shot users. The ones who are writing tutorials and
> howto's, the ones who are looking out for the beginner users. Why are
> they on the forums? Because they know their audience. They know the
> target of their writings are not on the mailing lists, they are on the
> forums.
I disagree here. People go to the forums because they are looking for a
social experience.  They don't want to dig through documentation to
learn the whole system, they want a personalized answer to the specific
problem at hand.   The documentation we work on doesn't provide an
interactive experience like that, and it doesn't always provide ordered
instructions for the user's set of tasks for the day - but for the most
part, all the answers *are* there for the taking.  Forums and mailing
lists provide the crucial role of helping people understand how to fit
all the pieces together.  The difference between the two delivery
methods is largely personal preference.

> How much of the Fedora design process is done in the open on the
> forums? I'm thinking of KDE's recent push with the Visual Design
> Group. A lot of work is happening and being talked about on blogs and
> such, but a lot is also happening in the Visual Design Group's
> dedicated forums. They are engaging users where the users are, and
> they are getting feedback. Sure, sometimes this feedback is just "Yay"
> or "Nay" but sometimes this feedback is in the form of a
> counter-proposal. That person, the one who just drew up a
> counter-proposal, they just got introduced to and dipped their feet
> into Visual Design. Never know, might inspire them to help out and
> contribute more often.

>
> The metaphor and relationship I was trying to create isn't perfect
> between the Fedora's Doc SIG and KDE's VDG, but I hope I made my point
> with how much of a mirror there could be.

Little to none of Fedora's decision making process takes place on
fedoraforums.org . We're all part of the greater Fedora community, but
that 's a third party site dedicated to user support.  Everything that
happens in Fedora is done completely in the open, mailing lists are
archived, meetings are logged, discussions are public, announcements
provided.  Transparency is a *big* priority within Fedora.  The delivery
method isn't what some might prefer, but there are *lots* of active
forums in many languages around the world, and distributing these
discussions among them would be a huge effort.  It's much more practical
to have all this going on in one place.  There's some work being done to
provide a more forum-like gateway to these discussions that Mairin Duffy
has been tracking on her blog[1]. 

The difference might be that opportunities to make improvements are just
as open. It's easy to say "You should do this differently," but not so
easy to say "I will make this better," and follow through.  Those of us
who are 'officially' contributing have made that commitment, and we're
glad to see you among us.


> On Sat, Aug 23, 2014 at 11:38 AM, Pete Travis <me at petetravis.com
> <mailto:me at petetravis.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 08/21/2014 01:20 PM, Eric Griffith wrote:
>     > Greetings all,
>     >
>     > I have used Fedora for a number of years now (a few of you may have
>     > seen me in the forums, or on Phoronix), but I have decided that
>     I wish
>     > to finally contribute to the project itself. As I just starting to
>     > learn Python, C++, and HTML/CSS/JS, but I am starting school for a
>     > Bachelor's Of English, I thought documentation would be the best way
>     > to start and get my foot in the door.
>     >
>     > I am also requesting permission to join the "docs" group on FAS
>     for my
>     > user (egriffith), as well as a pointing-in-the-right-direction for
>     > where to get started contributing.
>     >
>     >
>     > Cheers,
>     > --Ericg--
>
>     Welcome Eric!  I'm glad you've decided to join us.   Petr has covered
>     the reading material and social arrangements, so hopefully we'll hear
>     more from you.  Ironically the docs on joining docs sometimes need the
>     most attention, so if you find something that doesn't quite add
>     up, ask
>     questions or take the initiative and edit.  We can get so focused on
>     today's priority that maintenance might need someone to complain :)
>
>     That brings another idea to my caffeine-deprived mind.  ( You'll
>     notice
>     that we aren't shy about throwing around ideas before they're fully
>     formed; the group does a great job of forging idle thoughts into
>     productive ideas - or slag... )  You're coming from a part of the
>     Fedora
>     community we don't hear a lot from.  It's always bothered me that
>     there
>     are so many people investing vast amounts of time and wit into forums
>     discussions about Fedora, but we don't hear from them often.  Fedora
>     Docs has had a lot of discussions about community outreach, getting
>     feedback and input from the 'unofficial' community areas like
>     fedoraforum.org <http://fedoraforum.org>, and using the
>     information to incrementally improve our
>     offerings or write new things targeting their needs.
>
>     Eric, as an established participant there, where do you think we
>     need to
>     improve to better address the needs of that section of the user base?
>     Are there any pain points that come up regularly that we could address
>     with better docs?  Do you have any ideas about how we can establish an
>     effective feedback loop?
>
>     While we're pondering all that, yes, please do help with the release
>     notes!  At this stage in their development, we're doing a lot of
>     research and dumping info into the wiki at
>     https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Documentation_beats . 
>     Later the
>     info gets converted into docbook and committed into the git repository
>     for the RNs, but now, the focus is on content.
>
>     Of course, if you had *anything else* in mind to write about, we can
>     find a place for that too. There's lots to work on - what would
>     you like
>     to do?
>
>     --
>     -- Pete
>

[1] http://blog.linuxgrrl.com/category/hyperkitty/

-- 
-- Pete Travis
 - Fedora Docs Project Leader
 - 'randomuser' on freenode
 - immanetize at fedoraproject.org

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