Fedora Join Special Interest Group

The Fedora Join Special Interest Group (SIG) aims to set up and maintain channels that let prospective contributors engage with the community. The idea here is to enable people looking to join the Fedora community to converse with existing members, make friends, find mentors, and get a feeling of what and how the community does in general, with a view to reducing the learning curve that joining a new community entails---and make it more enjoyable!

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The Fedora Join (SIG) is involved in:

Welcome to the Fedora community!

We are people from all over the world that come together to develop the various tools, software, and material to promote Free and Open Source Software. Fedora is a massive organisation, and we carry out different roles to keep the community ticking.

Communicate with us to learn what we do and how the Fedora community works.

All the infrastructure that we use is linked to a Fedora Account. You can get one here.

Get started!

We have a Welcome to Fedora process for new comers. If you can please get in touch with us on any of our communication channels, we’ll get you started.

Please be patient as this could take a day or two for one of us to get back with you for onboarding

Mission

Different teams already have different, mostly well documented, SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) for joining their respective SIG. The infrastructure team is a great example of this. However, we often meet people who are unsure of how their skills fit into the community. We want to provide these people with a channel where they can speak to existing members of the community, learn about what they do and use this information to find the right team to get started with. We help new members form relationships with other members; we point them to the right resources - wiki or otherwise; and we expect that this should greatly improve the joining experience.

Goals

  • Set up a communication channel between the existing contributors and prospective contributors. Speaking to current team members is always encouraging. We could even set up a system to send "easyfix" tasks to this mailing list giving folks a chance to work on them and learn in the process.

  • Guide/aid prospective contributors to turn into solid contributors. Rather than just pointing them to join.fedoraproject.org, talk to them, see what issues they face, help them decide where they want to get started.

  • To form better mentor-mentee relationships. Here, we mean "mentor" in the real sense of the word.

  • Give prospective contributors a communication channel to talk to each other. This is very important. Take the Google Summer of Code mailing list for instance. It is set up specifically so that the candidates can talk to each other. Since they’re all in the same boat, they feel more comfortable discussing certain issues amongst themselves. They’ll also be aware of what different people are up to which will give them a better idea of what they can do. It would be great if they could discuss and share the cool stuff they’ve begun to do. It would surely be encouraging.

Basically, look for potential, not polish. We can help them gain the polish that established contributors have.

Communication

We prefer Matrix/Element for synchronous communication. Element provides a web-based application that you can use in your web browser. It also provides desktop and mobile phone applications if you prefer.

The Fedora community has its own Matrix/Element homeserver that one can login to using their Fedora Account. However, you can also access the channel using the default Matrix/Element homeserver where a Fedora Account is not required.

Additionally, we also use the mailing list/and or Fedora Discussion for asynchronous discussion:

Membership

In general, members of the Fedora-Join SIG should be contributors experienced enough to be able to help newbies. So, as a guideline (not a strict rule), we suggest that:

  • a SIG member should be part of two other groups (CLA+2)

  • active for at least the previous release cycle

  • must be subscribed to the mailing list

While we do not usually need to clean up the membership group, we will periodically do so to remove inactive members. This will be done by gathering data from datagrepper on activity.

Please file a ticket on our Pagure instance to apply for membership. The current membership can be viewed in FAS here.

Temporary membership for new community members

We also provide temporary membership to newbies just getting started in the Fedora community. This is so that they have access to Fedora infrastructure that requires a CLA+1 (membership of at least one SIG), such as the wiki. This is part of the workflow for newcomers. Please get in touch with us, and we can discuss about that.

Tasking

We use Pagure to manage tasks we are working on and the issues we need help with. Submit a ticket if you need help from Fedora Join or help us with existing tickets by visiting our repository.

Meetings

Occassionally, the Fedora Join team hosts meetings.

You can find information about when the meetings are held via the Fedora App Calendar.

Go there and sign in with your FAS Account.

The process is very simple:

Agenda for Next Meeting

  • Roll call

  • New member introductions

  • Community announcements

  • Tasks from past week

    • Pagure tickets, marked for discussion in this meeting issues

    • Pagure tickets, marked for discussion in a future meeting issues

    • Lots of tasks, please refer to the past logs

  • New items

    • Whatever is needed at that moment

  • Open Floor

Hosting a meeting

  • Follow our agenda (see above) or use this guide for tips on running an effective meeting.

  • Meeting chair responsibilities:

    • Prior to meeting, Send out reminder

    • After meeting

      • Send out logs

      • Prepare next meeting agenda

All meetings use the Fedora Join meeting template. Everyone is welcome to attend.

Meeting minutes are logged at Meetbot.

Ways to get involved

  • Blogging about Fedora

  • Mentor

  • Help with issues

  • Share ideas to make this SIG, and Fedora, better

Want to help? Learn how to contribute to Fedora Docs ›