[Debconf-discuss] Education stuff : key ?
Hello everyone,
I'm quite new at Debian, and I'm attending the DebConf10, New York.
Amazing BTW.
So, I've been watching the talks, and a few had some things in common.
Like how to get new people to contribute/collaborate with Debian. Main
point in this e-mail.
I'm new, I've been learning things consulting some docs, asking for
people I know, and trying to help step-by-step. So if the things I'll
say do not apply or already been discussed please, let me know, or
show me where I can discuss those topics.
When a new potential contributor(future, or not) or a user try to get
some information what does hi gets? What's his/her first impression?
IRC, Mail list, wiki, huge number of documentation to read, etc (man
man ?). The fist impression is one of the most import items to get new
people working on/using Debian, or any other project. I'm mean, If
it's difficult to get information, like how to contribute, people may
think is hard to contribute/use. (motivation).
Yep, I do like irc, like mail(lie), and like to read
documentation(when it was written to be read!!! | when I find it). My
main point here is that our new users, maybe are not comfortable with
our way to release information. Things are changing, people are using
forums, web interface tools to translate everything, auto-building
tools for many things and blablabla. New, people may not like irc,
mail and etc. There are many technologies that can help us to
integrate new users to the project.
I would like to suggest in this first part, (I know, I suppose not
right long e-mails, sorry) a team to work in the capture of new
people, discovering problems, looking to take care of our users, our
future developers, ours future advertisement. But keeping everything
in the Debian way.
At this time you must be thinking in give up reading my mail, =/. But,
wait, I promise, just a few more lines. (Then you can punch me =/)
I was watching the Margarita's talk(Making Debian rule, again), and
she showed us a few important items that she asked for some
developers. The first tree words were, motivation, visibility and
communication. Those tree words are direct connected into a outside
idea, e-learning. A student can't study without motivation, to keep
going, visibility, he needs to know that his studding for something in
future and communication, it's really important for human things,
without it, there's no community.
If we have a LMS, or another kind of environment to teach our users,
future developers and other people related would be a way to capture
the attention of users in a way that new people would be comfortable
to join us. We can have any kind of courses that can teach people in a
easy way. Like, Packaging programs from the source code, Packaging
perl programs, Packaging Java, and go on, Debian Publicity, Debian
Merchan., DebConf, Advertise, Debian Philosophy, etc. It's not only
about to keep the information healthy and easy to be found, easy to be
learned. It's about where we wanna be in the future. If we take care
of people in a good way now(teaching, make things easier), people will
take care of us in a good way on the future.
But, many of us maybe do not care about new methods, because our
method still working for us. But, what I mean here is until when will
we take care of Debian? We need to look forward, thinking about the
people who will wanna help, and help then in a way that they can
understand us(no, new users don't to read mail with mutt.). Using a
teach environment we can: Turn things easier for new people, stop
raising the numbers of "look the documentation answers", develop a
comfortable way to bring contributors, improve some documentation,
raise our visibility in many ways.
Yes, I know, (setting up)develop this kind of environment will be
pretty hard, boring, annoying and painful. But, why dont we set up a
team to look after this kind of problems?
So, you can punch me now if I said something stupid. =D But this is my
feeling as a user trying to find the ways to contribute now. Sorry
about the long e-mail and my pour English.
[]'s
--
Bruno Gurgel Gomes de Oliveira
4Linux Consultant
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