Re: Requesting DDs who want to help greet new contributors
Hi,
On Sun, Aug 04, 2013 at 12:08:15PM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> I'm currently processing the answers to the survey I mentioned in [1].
> Looking at what I've processed so far, one of the conclusions, I think,
> will be that a very large proportion of people who managed to get their
> first package uploaded had a friend or colleague to whom they could ask
> questions when needed. This is not a bad thing per se, but it means that
> it's much harder for people without such a "direct support channel" to
> succeed.
IMHO newcomers just do not expect to find such a friend inside the
Debian community. My canonical answer to increase the chances that
people will be able to easily find friends is to build teams with a
certain focus which should try to make themselves visible to users
(=potential developers). We just found the name Blends for this and I
hope to be able to *prove* that Blends can be help getting new
developers in my talk at DebConf[1] when I present numbers that we have
won one DD per year (in average) who admitted that he is only in Debian
*because* this specific Blend exist. If this is possible for a leaf
project as I defintely regard medicine and biology how much better could
be our chances in other fields if people would *actively* reach out
for users and thus developers as Debian Med did?
> This initiative could be the basis for a way for new contributors to
> find such a "online Debian friend" that could then answer their
> questions about BTS usage, packaging, etc.
In Debian Med this is called Mentoring of the Month[2] and besides
I will metnion it in[1] as well I will have a dedicated talk about
MoM as well[3].
Kind regards
Andreas.
[1] http://penta.debconf.org/dc13_schedule/events/986.en.html
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/MoM
[3] http://penta.debconf.org/dc13_schedule/events/987.en.html
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