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Fedora Join SIG 2019 retrospective
SIG members
There are five active members animating the SIG. One contributor asked to join the SIG in 2019.
We get in touch with new people pratically every day.
The majority of newcomers get in touch via Telegram, someone via IRC and the fewer in the mailing list.
What we have accomplished
2019 was a year of novelties for the Fedora Join SIG: the community has now a modern forum platform hosted on Discourse, and we have set up a new way for newcomers and wannabe contributors to get in touch with the community.
Ask Fedora
Around April, Fedora opened a new forum which replaced the old Askbot instance. The new forum is powered by Discourse. We spent a lot of time thinking to the best set up for the categories. The goal was to keep them low and related to the distribution lifecycle. So we ended up with two main categories (for each supported language): installation/upgrade, daily usage. For a more precise categorization of the posts, people can use the tags (by using the existing ones or by creating new ones).
Obviously, as usual, in the first times we received some ranting about the change. Mainly because the broken links someone could encounter on search engines still pointing to the old Ask Fedora instance. But it was our intention to collect useful an frequently asked questions on Askbot and convert them to quick-docs (maybe with the help of some volunteer). So, apart the first criticisms, now Ask Fedora is well established and there are new discussions every day, with a generally polite and constructive behaviour leading to solve many issues. Another goal of the new Forum was/is to invite and foster new contributions to the community, and not only an helpdesk channel.
For more data and statistics about Ask Fedora, we will publish a dedicated article.
--- https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/askfedora-refresh-weve-moved-to-discourse/
--- Some detalied data (users, posts, activities) could be published in a subsequent article (maybe in March)?
New welcome path
Classrooms
Between the last months of 2018 and the first months of 2019 we were able to organize six Fedora Classrooms.
This is the list:
- Containers 101 with Podman hosted by Alessandro Arrichiello
- LaTeX 101 hosted by Ankur Sinha "FranciscoD"
- Building container images with Buildah hosted by Dan Walsh (we suffered big technical issues)
- L10N 101 hosted by Silvia Sánchez
- Fedora Silverblue hosted by Micah Abbott
- Creating Fedora Badges hosted by Riecatnor
We spotted that, from a technical point of view, it is difficult to host a live classroom especially when there are many attendees. For instance, in the Containers 101 with Podman classroom, where the Bluejeans video platform was used, there were 90 attendees. When we have used Jitsi, we realized that it is not the right tool to use when the attendees are more than 10.
So we figured that for the future it could be better to run classroom asynchronously: the presenter records the video, we upload it to the Fedora Youtube channel, and we create a dedicated Q&A post on discussion.fedoraproject.org in the classroom category.
Documentation
The team did several works in order to document their SOPs (Standard Operation Procedures) and Ask Fedora ones, moving and updating some of the documents from the wiki to Docs.
- https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-join/
- https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/ask-fedora-sops/
We documented how the workflow for newcomers should work https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-join/welcome/welcome/, and thank to the Design Team we have also a nice banner. https://pagure.io/fedora-join/Welcome-to-Fedora/raw/master/f/Artwork/Welcome-to-Fedora-banner.png
For Ask Fedora we wrote
- a User Guide https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/ask-fedora-sops/user_en/
- a Standard Operation Procedure for Moderator https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/ask-fedora-sops/mod_en/,
- how to add new staff https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/ask-fedora-sops/staff/
- how to add a new language support to the forum https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/ask-fedora-sops/languages/
- how forum's categories are organized https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/ask-fedora-sops/categories/
The future?
What we need to do better?
...