Bringing newly-installed users into the community (Re: Should XChat default to freenode and #ubuntu?)

[Mary Gardiner]

On Thu, Feb 10, 2005, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> The problem is ensuring there are people *with clue* to staff it. Look
> at the forums some time - hardly any of the developers like using
> forums, so there's an entire culture of confusion and myth generation
> there.

There's two choices here: either don't do it; or figure out what
incentives there are for people with clue to hang out there.

I'm thinking of the LinuxChix community, in which a great deal of
community credibility is attached to your ability to give detailed,
helpful, supportive and clear help to newbie level questions. (On the
technical mailing lists I mean, LinuxChix actually has rather heated
social lists, and it's been some years since I was on the IRC channel.)
Given that, it's not all that surprising that LinuxChix actually has
quite a successful newbie-specific mailing list because the community is
full of clueful people who pick up on this "we greatly respect people
who give detailed, helpful, supportive and clear help to newbie level
questions" vibe and they therefore tend to actually join the newbie list
and spend a great deal of time writing out posts about installing
packages, basic CLI stuff etc etc.

Another factor involved in its success is that LinuxChix encourages
posters to "be polite and be helpful" as its fundamental policy (again,
most successfully on the technical mailing lists). Given that the Ubuntu
community has a similarly spirited Code of Conduct that shouldn't be a
problem: it's whether you can generate an atmosphere where clueful feel
that they could get something (community warm fuzzies probably) out of
helping newbies.

FWIW, the newchix at linuxchix.org list was formed in response to these
concerns:

 - the main technical list was high traffic
 
 - the very level of the discussion itself, with questions that a newbie
   thought were very advanced followed by "just fooozle the whatsit and
   reload the modulatoration" and "oh of course, how silly, I should
   have tried that, thanks" in reply was scary

Unfortunately, forming a newbie list/channel tends to be only a
temporary solution to the first problem: the very nature of success will
push the traffic up. It does seem to have solved the second problem on
LinuxChix, although occasionally we have to push the "scary"
conversations off with a "the internal details of linkers are not
newchix level" post.

-Mary