[Openstack] [docs][all][ptl] Contributor Portal and Better New Contributor On-boarding

Mike Perez thingee at gmail.com
Thu Jun 29 20:15:26 UTC 2017


+ OpenStack dev list

Hello all,

Wes has just took my ugly mock up of the contributor portal idea and
came up with this [1].

Here’s what he said:

"The idea is to help get potential contributors to the right place,
using the outline Mike put together. Rather than sending people to a
different page for each contribution type, users would be able to see
what options are available all on this page. We’d send them to any
necessary page(s) once they’ve gone through this quasi-wizard. Is this
along the lines of what you were thinking? page 2 shows the view once
you’ve clicked “Code” on page 1 (just in case that wasn’t super
obvious) Thanks!”

What do you all think? This does change things a bit of instead of the
landing page being more obvious of a resource of links, it’s both for
new and current contributors. Current contributors would hopefully be
able to see the resource links below.

Keep in mind that we will be working in the “Top 5 requested help” and
as suggested by Clark, an option of “I don’t know where I want to
start, but I want to help” kind of option. This would direct people to
resources such as Upstream University, mentor program, low hanging
fruit, that release priority idea I talked about earlier, etc.

Personally I like it!


[1] - https://www.dropbox.com/s/3q172qwfkik1ysd/contributor-portal.pdf?dl=0

—
Mike Perez

> On June 27, 2017 at 13:48:36, Mike Perez (thingee at gmail.com) wrote:
> > Hello all,
> >
> > Every month we have people asking on IRC or the dev mailing list having interest in working
> > on OpenStack, and sometimes they're given different answers from people, or worse,
> > no answer at all.
> >
> > Suggestion: lets work our efforts together to create some common documentation so
> that
> > all teams in OpenStack can benefit.
> >
> > First it’s important to note that we’re not just talking about code projects here. OpenStack
> > contributions come in many forms such as running meet ups, identifying use cases (product
> > working group), documentation, testing, etc. We want to make sure those potential
> contributors
> > feel welcomed too!
> >
> > What is common documentation? Things like setting up Git, the many accounts you need
> > to setup to contribute (gerrit, launchpad, OpenStack foundation account). Not all
> > teams will use some common documentation, but the point is one or more projects will
> use
> > them. Having the common documentation worked on by various projects will better help
> > prevent duplicated efforts, inconsistent documentation, and hopefully just more
> > accurate information.
> >
> > A team might use special tools to do their work. These can also be integrated in this idea
> > as well.
> >
> > Once we have common documentation we can have something like:
> > 1. Choose your own adventure: I want to contribute by code
> > 2. What service type are you interested in? (Database, Block storage, compute)
> > 3. Here’s step-by-step common documentation to setting up Git, IRC, Mailing Lists,
> > Accounts, etc.
> > 4. A service type project might choose to also include additional documentation in
> that
> > flow for special tools, etc.
> >
> > Important things to note in this flow:
> > * How do you want to contribute?
> > * Here are **clear** names that identify the team. Not code names like Cloud Kitty, Cinder,
> > etc.
> > * The documentation should really aim to not be daunting:
> > * Someone should be able to glance at it and feel like they can finish things in five minutes.
> > Not be yet another tab left in their browser that they’ll eventually forget about
> > * No wall of text!
> > * Use screen shots
> > * Avoid covering every issue you could hit along the way.
> >
> > ## Examples of More Simple Documentation
> > I worked on some documentation for the Upstream University preparation that has received
> > excellent feedback meet close to these suggestions:
> > * IRC [1]
> > * Git [2]
> > * Account Setup [3]
> >
> > ## 500 Feet Birds Eye view
> > There will be a Contributor landing page on the openstack.org website. Existing contributors
> > will find reference links to quickly jump to things. New contributors will find a banner
> > at the top of the page to direct them to the choose your own adventure to contributing
> to
> > OpenStack, with ordered documentation flow that reuses existing documentation when
> > necessary. Picture also a progress bar somewhere to show how close you are to being ready
> > to contribute to whatever team. Of course there are a lot of other fancy things we can
> come
> > up with, but I think getting something up as an initial pass would be better than what
> we
> > have today.
> >
> > Here's an example of what the sections/chapters could look like:
> >
> > - Code
> > * Volumes (Cinder)
> > * IRC
> > * Git
> > * Account Setup
> > * Generating Configs
> > * Compute (Nova)
> > * IRC
> > * Git
> > * Account Setup
> > * Something about hypervisors (matrix?)
> > - Use Cases
> > * Products (Product working group)
> > * IRC
> > * Git
> > * Use Case format
> >
> > There are some rough mock up ideas [4]. Probably Sphinx will be fine for this. Potentially
> > we could use this content for conference lunch and learns, upstream university, and
> > the on-boarding events at the Forum. What do you all think?
> >
> > [1] - http://docs.openstack.org/upstream-training/irc.html
> > [2] - http://docs.openstack.org/upstream-training/git.html
> > [3] - http://docs.openstack.org/upstream-training/accounts.html
> > [4] - https://www.dropbox.com/s/o46xh1cp0sv0045/OpenStack%20contributor%20portal.pdf?dl=0
>



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