Developments on the Ubuntu governance

[Elizabeth K. Joseph]

On Sun, Nov 16, 2014 at 6:51 PM, Ian Weisser <ian-weisser at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> The problem Aveem's example highlights is not Ubuntu's complexity, it is
> not developers-don't-pay-attention-to-social-media, it is not
> documentation. The problem is that we do not engage new participants
> immediately, mentor them, and train them. We let new participants get
> frustrated and walk away.
>
> This is extracted from an old leader planning checklist I dug out from
> perhaps 20 years ago when I was volunteering in an entirely different
> field:
>
>   - When a new volunteer appears, who greets them?
>   - Who mentors them to explain the organization, and to match their
> skills and expectations with your needs?
>   - Who shows them how to get training, and tracks their training
> progress?
>   - Who offers them greater challenges and responsibility as they
> progress?
>   - Who periodically mentors them to ensure they are happy with their
> direction? How often?
>   - When a volunteer drops away, who notices? How soon? Who contacts
> them?
>   - Who does the exit interview to learn the reason for leaving? When?

I think this is a wonderful checklist, but while it's easy to welcome
someone who walks through the physical door, it's difficult for an
online project where people frequently silently attempt to join and
silently leave. If someone views the Documentation wiki, thinks it's
too complicated and immediately closes their browser, we have no
record of that and no way to contact them. As a long-time member of
the project, I thought "the docs are accurate, we give you all the
steps so you don't need to learn about all these tools, no problem!"
but in reality based on feedback on this list this week, it's still
overwhelming and people do believe they need to learn a lot. But we
simply don't have a feedback mechanism to tell us these things so I
had no idea.

You will notice that as soon as the Documentation topic came up here,
two of us were eager to jump in and welcome them, that's pretty common
for the Docs team these days, if people come to talk to us, but they
often don't. The "exit interview" idea is also great for real life
interactions, but in our community people sometimes just leave, they
don't tell us they're leaving, they just disappear and though many of
us do have a habit of following-up with folks who drop off, it's most
commonly personal/work life issues that have come up and they don't
wish to talk about it (if I get a reply from them at all).

I'd be happy to hear any thoughts on how to translate these things for
an online community.

Some of these tips do apply, like taking a more proactive approach to
training, mentoring and checking in with contributors, but that all
takes volunteer power that we're sorely lacking in many of the
community-driven projects. It would be great to see this as more of a
priority in many teams, but it's a long road and I'm not sure how to
promote that when our current volunteers are already overwhelmed with
the straight workload and aren't particularly talented at
mentoring/training/etc. The Beginners Team was mentioned elsewhere in
this thread, but even that languished due to lack of volunteers who
were keen on mentoring and had a firm enough grasp on the material to
be a mentor.

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph || Lyz || pleia2
http://www.princessleia.com