Open Stack

Hi all,

I think we should separate between mentoring efforts and documentation.

For the first one, is true that there are always tons of tasks to do but
sometimes a beginner won't find them because they are not familiar with the
workflow neither with the community. People that is not involved with
open-source just doesn't know where to start when reaching to an
organization of this kind. So, having someone to ask about this is usually
a great help. That is something OpenHatch is intended to solve.

I must say that OpenHatch is not time consuming and helped several people
to join OpenStack and start contributing to it. And that is great :)

Another thing we tried last year is #openstack-101, a channel for new
contributors where they are free to ask any doubt they could have. I'm
happy to say this worked as a hub between newcomers and the community and
that lots of people have been able to start working with us.

About documentation, I agree that it could be quite overwhelming the first
time, but that is how complex our organization is. The thing is... we get
used to that.

Perhaps we could ask new contributors what they would like to find in the
'How to contribute' wiki page and refine it to make it easier for new
people (I volunteer for that!).

Finally, I wanted to mention that mentoring is great. I still have many
things to learn, but I have been able to guide people with their first
steps in the community and is cool to see how a little effort like that
mean, later in time, great contributions.

Thanks all for the feedback,

Victoria



2014-02-13 23:46 GMT-03:00 Luis de Bethencourt <luis at debethencourt.com>:

> On 13 February 2014 21:09, Jeremy Stanley <fungi at yuggoth.org> wrote:
>
>> On 2014-02-12 14:42:17 -0600 (-0600), Dolph Mathews wrote:
>> [...]
>> > There's a lot of such scenarios where new contributors can
>> > quickly find things to contribute, or at lest provide incredibly
>> > valuable feedback to the project in the form of reviews!
>> [...]
>>
>> I heartily second the suggestion. The biggest and best thing I did
>> as a new contributor was to start reviewing changes first thing. An
>> initial contributor, if they have any aptitude for software
>> development at all, will be able to tell a ton about our development
>> community by how it interacts through code review. The test-centric
>> methodology, style guidelines and general level of
>> acceptance/tolerance for various things become immediately apparent.
>> You also get to test your understanding of the source by watching
>> all the mistakes other reviewers find that you missed in your
>> reviewing. Refine and repeat.
>>
>> Getting a couple of very simple changes in right away also helps you
>> pick up the workflow and toolset, but reviewing others changes is a
>> huge boon to both the project and the would-be contributors doing
>> the reviewing... much more so than correcting a handful of
>> typographical errors.
>> --
>> Jeremy Stanley
>>
>
>
> That is a very good idea Jeremy.
>
> I started learning and contributing to OpenStack yesterday. I have been
> writing down all the things I do, read and discover. Planning to blog about
> and share it. I think it would be valuable to show how to contribute and
> learn the project from the point of view of a novice to it.
>
> Cheers,
> Luis
>
>
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>
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