[Sugar-devel] Helping people to get started

[Daniel Narvaez]

Hello,

I've been seeing this a *lot* on the irc channel

19:44 -!- moriarty_ [~anubhav at 14.139.82.6] has joined #sugar
19:45 < moriarty_> Hi ! I'm new here and I would like to contribute to your
                   project. Can someone get me started?
20:01 -!- moriarty_ [~anubhav at 14.139.82.6] has quit [Ping timeout: 272
seconds]

There are really a lot of people that would like to contribute. But we have
few good resources to get them started and I have the feeling we are not
doing a good job at pointing them to those.

developer.sugarlabs.org is the most updated and valuable resource these
days but from a quick look to stats.sugarlabs.org it is very very low in
number of visits. The getting involved page on the wiki is not doing much
better.

Another major issue is that developer.sugarlabs.org does not have a page
about tasks contributors could tackle, which is usually what they ask for
in irc.

What I would like to do is

* Decide what should be the entry point for developers.
* Make sure it's well linked both from the main website and from the wiki,
which seems to be the most important entry points.
* Put a link in the irc channel subject.
* Add a page on developer.sugarlabs.org on how to find tasks to work on.
* Figure out how get these people to talk to someone, if no one is around
when they join irc. I have the feeling subscribing to the mailing list is
too much of a barrier. Maybe the bot could point them to a page with a list
of people they can email directly?  I see Gonzalo already volunteers for
that in the wiki, I'm happy to share the workload if necessary.

About the first point in the list, we probably need an intermediate page
like

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Getting_Involved

but I think clicking on "Developer" should then go directly to
developer.sugarlabs.org.

Something to keep in consideration is that doing changes to the main
website might be difficult (a full rewrite is planned but currently stuck).
Though I think we should try to at least get a link to Getting_Involved
there.

So this is all a bit random, I'll try to make more concrete proposals
later, but I would really like to hear people thoughts. Most of the times,
when I scroll back my irc screen I see a potential contributor quitting
like that and it's a bit depressing...

-- 
Daniel Narvaez
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