Developments on the Ubuntu governance

Elizabeth K. Joseph lyz at ubuntu.com
Sat Nov 22 19:54:23 UTC 2014


On Sat, Nov 22, 2014 at 6:48 AM, Ian Weisser <ian-weisser at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On the other hand, if I made an edit or two, an e-mail from a team
> member saying "Hey, I saw your edit and it looks great. Thanks for
> participating. Did the instructions make sense?" would be quite
> appropriate. Positive feedback, recognition for effort, invitation to
> conversation. Humans eat that stuff up and come back for more. That's
> one method of effective recruiting (and sales).
>
> Let's take that conjectural recruiting attempt a step farther: If the
> leader task is to review new-contributor edits and send the contact
> e-mail, then a supporting technical tool could be a web-scraping robot
> that pulls all the recent documentation edits, and figures out which
> ones are from previous non-contributors or rare-contributors. (I'm sure
> there are better ways than that)

These are both good ideas, thanks!

> I've been wandering this community for nine years or so, and I believe
> you were here before me. You're mighty smart and experienced and
> capable, and I'm sure you can some up with a better way to make
> recruiting and retention of the Documentation team into simple routines
> based on useful metrics and data than my little conjecture.

I appreciate that :) but it's really not my forte. In my mind, if the
"get involved" instructions exist, people should just read them and
get involved (like I did). But as you say, I'm familiar with Ubuntu
and open source communities, so I've mostly forgotten what it's like
to be a newcomer and what they need, what motivates many of them. I
hope out of this conversation comes more folks who can help me, and
other people on my teams, build a better picture of how we can
recognize, welcome and reward new people.

>> Some of these tips do apply, like taking a more proactive approach to
>> training, mentoring and checking in with contributors[...]
>
> It's not so much 'proactive' as 'systematic' or 'routine' or
> 'delegated'. Other members of the team do most of the actual work (and
> build the relationships that keep them coming back). Recruiting and
> management tasks and even some leader tasks will continue to happen
> while the leader is on vacation.
>
>> 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.
>
> A great point!
> Recruiting is a set of tools and skills. Nothing magic about it. Happy
> to talk about the theory in much greater detail. A team that lacks those
> tools and skills saves on their overhead...but may have fewer members
> and a higher per-capita workload.
>
> Without an active recruiting policy/method/system/whatever-you-want-
> to-call-it, I argue that the project is unintentionally creating a
> higher barrier to entry, and selecting for the smaller number of users
> willing to overcome that barrier. Unintentionally!

So what I'm reading here is that we need more *community builder* type
people in our communities, where we've typically just been seeking out
talent to do the actual work (ie doc writers). That makes sense.
Perhaps what I need to do is instead of being discouraged by our lack
of contributors to help us recruit and retain talent, I should draw up
some ideas so that when that person does appear who can help us they
have guidelines in place for how to do that. This is a relatively
small investment of time so I think it's doable.

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



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