openSUSE community manager Zonker points out this wonderful slideshow on sabotaging your community (pdf). In terms of Fedora I feel points 5 and 7 apply. We tend to require signed license agreements to fart and our governance model is confusing to put it mildly. E.g. I’ve been considering running for FESCo or the Board but I have no clear idea what either ones governance scope is and where what I want to do is best approached.. I suspect the board but it is not obvious since I’d like to see some fundamental changes in the way we handle new contributors to make the Fedora community more welcoming and do a better job at providing education and guidance for contributors, the changes would affect FESCo as well I suspect. I would like to encourage people to work together more attacking problem areas, right now it seems when a problem is found we do a lot of unloading on contributors who may very well be unexperienced with certain kinds of things and I know we have people who can help, I’d like the norm to be for these people to be willing to see the bigger picture and jump in with patches and advice when they point out a problem.. in much the same way I previously suggested that the correct way to respond to someone wanting to rip out functionality without a sufficient exit strategy for consumers of this functionality or a replacement should be plain and simple: “no, back to the drawing board”.
How to destroy a community (specifically Fedora)
May 13, 2008 at 13:31 (Fedora, Linux)
Tags: community, election, fedora, governance
Russell Harrison said,
May 15, 2008 at 01:49
That’s a really good presentation. I’d agree about points 5 and 7, but at least those issues are being worked on. I know the Fedora guys at Red Hat are working really hard to lower the barriers and streamline the process of joining the project.
davidnielsen said,
May 15, 2008 at 09:12
Sadly every problem we encounter we seem to solve by adding more policy and beaucracy. We are not inviting to contributors, people fight to be part of Fedora and many do lose interest because we don’t do enough hand holding and teaching with new members of our community.
“This pea sized book contains your rights, and this book the size of a small sedan contains your obligations” – Is just a horrible message to send, and it certainly does not do wonders for getting us contributors who after all do this for free. Sell it to them as being part of something important and fun, tell them we will help them all the way through to learn and become part of the family.
Russell Harrison said,
May 15, 2008 at 22:38
No argument there. I’m only saying that at least the problem is known, and people are looking at what can be done about it. I’m pretty sure its going to take a long time to correct, but as long as we keep making progress hopefully we’ll get there. If it starts going backwards again then we need to raise a stink about it. Little reminders like this post are a good way to make sure people don’t forget to keep working on it.