 So thank you all for coming and I think we'll start let me introduce Ashish who will talk about mentorship and Other floss project. Thanks So hi everyone. I wanted to talk a little bit in this session about How other free software projects I know have done a really good job or sometimes not a great job of Mentoring and then I want to open it up to discussion I have one really vivid recommendation that comes from reading about all this and hopefully we'll talk about that Let me quickly ask Can everyone hear me? Okay. Am I speaking slowly enough? Okay, I often speak way too fast and I often fail to use consonants which Makes me incomprehensible. So I hope that you'll tell me if I'm doing that Maybe just like yeah, and there's a sign at the back that says slower, please if necessary great So the first Wait What I really oh I see, okay, I'm gonna do one thing great Yeah, so the first Free software project wide mentorship effort that I heard about is genome love which started in about December 2004 How many of her have heard of genome love? All right, cool So it's how many have heard of genome just take of a baseline Okay, great. Okay. So it isn't just like the people raising their hands know everything. It's that actually there's some knowledge gaps. So great So Yeah, the point of genome love was to try to address the on ramp for genome contributions from new volunteers in the community and So the first things they did were they made a wiki page that had recommendations for first-time contributions, so they linked to Recommended first tasks in a variety of genome sub projects they linked to the how to get started developing guide for a bunch of genome sub projects and The idea was that with that plus the mailing list they would find new contributors to the project direct them toward these new these entry-level contributions and Hopefully therefore Create more sort of ad hoc mentorship where people found out things that they could work on then got help on them and Shortly after December 2005 in like a mark. Sorry. They began in December 2005 in about March They began in about December 2004 and in about March 2005 They added a bugzilla tag also so that if something has keyword genome love on a genome bugzilla Then that means it's a good first task and bugzilla also links back to this wiki page So people can get a sense that that's this is what that means and they also wanted to run Chat events which they began doing. I don't know how many they ran, but they certainly ran at least one which We're about Helping people learn more about genome contribution and at least their first one they had a pretty big attendance 10 to 20 people as I recall And when I say this it's not because I was there It's because I read the wiki pages and I read the history of those wiki pages So you can all go do this research yourself. Nothing special here but the concerns that I have when I think about this now eight years later are First trying to figure out who is the audience of genome love. Is it people who are experienced c-programmers that they want to Shepherd into the genome community in which case. How are they reaching those people? Are they going to find going out to like top? CS Universities and finding the ones that teach see and then to emailing them all and directing them to this page And the other question I have well and the answer is no as far as I know There was no directed outreach as part of genome love and the second question I have is that I don't think that the genome love crew can detect if their efforts are really working They can see that some bugs that are marked genome love get closed But they don't really know I think if that's because of the wiki page if that's because they were market on love at all I don't think they really have a sense of if the people Who are new to those communities? Benefited from the work they're doing So that was sort of the first mentorship effort that I learned about and I've been thinking a lot more about mentorship over the past four Years the next major Thing that struck me when I heard about it and this was in real time is Google summer of code Ah, and my slide things are separated one second. You can't tell but my presentation console isn't working Okay, now you can't tell great. So yeah the point of you know Google summer of code in the beginning was to bring new students into the free software community and According to the Chris Devona who originally managed the program or managed the managers of the program. He thinks it's reasonably okay for attention The structure does anybody here? Does everybody in this any person in this room not know the structural details of Google summer of code? I know it's a bad question ask it doesn't know. Okay, great Yeah, but yeah, okay, so briefly Google summer of code is a paid mentorship program between a free software community like Debian and University student where the university student works for 12 weeks during the summer gets paid and has a specific task They work on and has a specific mentor that's assigned to them So it does mean there's a strong relationship between the mentor and the mentee which is interesting and fairly different from what can own love does It's also time-limited to those 12 weeks and goal-oriented when you're doing these things You really want to finish the project that you set us up set for yourself at the beginning of the summer He's here some scoffs But some questions I have about summer of code are how resilient is it to student failure in the sense that if a student Doesn't manage to get all the work. They want to get done. Do they just feel so bad that they want to vanish from the community and Does the mentor feel like they wasted all that time working on with this one student? I mean in a lot of cases I would say yes, they do feel that way And it's I also think that Google summer of code isn't that resilient to mentor failure, which is a serious problem So if I as a GSOC mentor this summer get really busy or go to Switzerland to go to a conference and can't mentor my student that well It would possibly happen if I didn't arrange for better help that my student would just be like lost without me so The one one interesting thing about Google summer of code in 2005 And 2006 is the gender representation. So Gnome In 2006 had 181 applicants for Google summer of code and I want to for those who know don't raise your hands But a pop quiz of these 181. What percent do you think were women? Yeah of the 181 Google summer of code applicants for Gnome in 2006 what percentage of them were women if I hear one is that a 2% guess I hear a 10% I hear is a C is zero coming from this side Yeah, so it turns out the answer is strictly zero And some good people in particular Chris Ball and Hannah Wallach who's also both of them are also slightly deviant people especially Hannah What I do something about this so they took Google summer of code and they inserted the word women into it And otherwise changed nothing they They ran the women summer outreach program, which was Strict, you know tight mentor-manteen relationship you work with the mentor to figure out what your project will be you get paid You work on it for 12 weeks the funding happened to come from a different source because they had Exceeded the Google summer of code deadline in order to get this bad data And when they did that they got a hundred applications for the women's summer outreach program Yeah, was it also separate what? Was this gnome women women summer outreach program also separatist so that the applicants and also the mentors were only women I think the mentors could be men and women But the applicants all had to be women. Yeah This this is one of my favorite things in free software mentorship history because it just shows that if you do anything To it shows to me that the big missing question for how to find new people is the extent to which we communicate in a Diverse way with the world. I think a lot of the reason that a hundred people signed up for this of whom six great people were chosen is Because the word women is in the title it made people who Received this who are on free software project mailing list think. Oh, yeah, I know what I could do to find more women for the project And it's funny because I could have thought that and forwarded the Google summer of code application information to their friends or whatever To their like 500 friends of whom 100 applied But you often have to do something to make people think about doing outreach at all and by default because our mailing lists are where a lot of our communication happened and Where a lot of these announcements get posted and those mailing lists are dominated largely by the kinds of people who are already in free software You see hilarious results like the zero percent applications from women for genome So yeah, to me the key lesson here is that doing outreach at all works great so the One one question mark here for the women's summer outreach program is that it happened once in 2006 Thanks to the great effort of Hannah and Chris ball But it didn't really happen again until 2010 and that's because Basically, Hannah and Chris didn't structure their mentorship program to avoid themselves burning out in 2007 all PC Became a huge thing Chris ball became super busy Hannah was working on our dissertation in linguistic and computers computational linguistics so Having an exit plan for your mentorship system, whatever that is for you the organizer is really important But yeah, so in 2010 Marino's Rock in Skyer revives this program before reviving the GNOME outreach program for the women's summer outreach program But we naming it the outreach program for women before doing that She just creates a list of mentors in GNOME just wants a wiki page that says who can be a mentor in GNOME And from a conversation I had with her two years ago The sense I got is that she got four people to sign up for that list of possible mentors But then once it was about a time-limited program that she got 40 or 50 people to sign up for that so This suggests to me that It's important to To give mentors some sense that they're not giving away their entire lives the Yeah, so she managed to run it increasingly frequently Not just once during the summer 2006, but two to three times per year But she also makes sure there's a one-month break between at least a one-month break between the sessions So that she has time to recover and the rest of her organizing team has time to recover and another great thing about the GNOME outreach program for women is that It does not require that the your contributions to the project for which you're doing the paid internship again It's a standard Google Summer of Code style tight relationship between the mentor and the mentee in the project, but because There are lots of people who do want to show up in program Where possible the outreach program for women directs them to apply to Google Summer of Code, so Then they use up their limited OPW resources on women who couldn't even get funded by Summer of Code because they're doing non-code things and the most recent The most recent version had 37 people and it had nine in GNOME eight or so projects participated maybe more and Seven of those people were kernel developers all of whom landed their first patch in the kernel in the first in the weeks And they were first couple weeks of their internship and that's thanks to the mentorship of Sarah Sharp and If you I'm just like People can just show up out of nowhere get mentored. Well Show up because there's a great outreach program that causes them to even hear about that free software community and believe they can participate and Then they get patches landed in the kernel I don't have that I should sign up for these programs maybe except I can't but that's fine because I actually can manage myself just fine Yeah, so basically if you had this kind of directed mentorship It really works and so for me one of the lessons from the outreach program for women Is that if a goal is to increase participation by women in whichever free software projects we're talking about We all all of our products have limited mentor resources We can just focus a large fraction of those mentor resources on a sub problem of our projects that we care a lot about One thing is I don't know if these are resilient to the mentors flaking out just like Google Summer of Code But that's life So I'd heard about all this and I went to Deb conf in 2010 and Organized a bird of a feather called Debian for shy people and it was one of the most fun experiences of my life We had this room like this but packed with people who are all like wow Yeah, we don't like talking to people and are afraid of them Just like me so that was a super inspiring experience So I thought okay, maybe I can try to apply this to the Debian mentors mailing list because often People shy. I'm sorry Often in my experience on Debian mentors people ask a question and then maybe don't know if I'll get an answer Don't get an answer and if you subscribe to the mailing list You just lurk you think who even knows if my questions are going to get answered. What's the point? This is so sad and distant and So what I wanted to do was set the community to have a goal of responding to those questions within four days Even if other response should be as simple as sorry no one's answering your question We're all very busy, but I hope somebody answers soon. That would be a lot more Reassuring than radio silence and more over seeing other people who you don't even know experience radio silence so what I learned from that is that I didn't have the bandwidth to succeed at that by myself and I Set this goal and Couldn't make it work. And so actually we saw a great increase in Debian mentors traffic when I declared We would all do this and then they tapered off when we didn't succeed at doing it. The other thing is Midway into this period We I was like, okay now that I created this promise I'd like to find out if we're actually succeeding at it and then I like Spent a bunch of time writing me mailing list scraping code that was more complicated than I expected because that's software and I should have done that first if I had some goals that were measurable. I should have set up my measurements first It would have saved it would have made this a lot better We could have had a little dashboard and then other people could be like oh man meantime responses six days I could respond faster, so With that failure under my belt, I thought I know I'll do something totally different I'll run how to get involved in a consortium workshop at a college near where I was living at the time at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the idea of this was to have a day of lectures where we taught people how to get involved how bug trackers work how virgin control works how communities and conversations work what was free software licensing is and There is kind of a very Welcoming approach to General free software mentorship, and I had a personal goal that I wanted to have a pretty diverse attendee base So I thought okay. I might have to go work with the women in computer science groups, etc What I found though was that by doing nothing but writing a very welcoming invitation to what to the event and sending it to the computer science mailing list 30% of my applicants for the event were women and We ended up being over full so we sort of sorted the applicants by how excited they were and at the top 30, you know Women seem to be equally likely to be super excited as men, so 30% of our actual attendees were women And we'd better do that without any gender-specific outreach because I think the text was written in a very welcoming way and Because we sent it to the most diverse possible Computer science mailing list we had at Penn by contrast if I had sent it to the computer club at Penn the dining philosophers The dining philosophers is almost entirely dudes So if I then did that I shouldn't be surprised to find if no women signed up because I didn't tell any women about it So yeah, we did general outreach there And that was a lot of fun But I didn't do a great job of capturing their enthusiasm and helping them stay active in the free software projects that they Want to submit patches to in the second day of the workshop so okay, more failures by a sheesh, but I'm slowly learning here and Around the same year. I saw something really exciting which I don't have much here in slides. Well, just tell you the the Fedora design team in 2009 and 2010 set up what they call design bounties and these bounties are different than standard code bounties for money they They operate in the following way There's one person in the project who says We really need this task done so we really need a t-shirt design for our students who worked on Fedora over the summer and She writes a blog post that says here's why this is here's what the task is here's why it is so important I'm running about this on my blog Which means that it's super easy to read and it's not like you have to be part of any existing community like if we're on a mailing list basically and I will offer you mentorship if you want to do this and the prize for succeeding is not money It's instead you get commit access to the Fedora design subversion repository and you are part of our team So the prize is the capacity to do more work And I like But I think it's also I like to say the prize is sort of love like you get inclusion in the community you know that if you do this you're part of the Fedora design team and you're part of something bigger and She also says in the blog post leave a comment to lock this and then you get 48 hours to attempt it and then I'll review your work and offer to mentor you and help make your work the best it could be if we accept your work great, otherwise the task is sort of unlocked and it goes the next person who left a comment and What they found was they did this three or four times and got a Reliable reliably they got somebody new to the community to show up many of whom have stuck around since and I've been trying to clone this and other free software projects I did it twice in 2010 once for the open hatch website code in Django and once for the students for free culture systems system administration team and in both cases We found a young woman who was already on our mailing list who really wanted to get more involved and really wanted to be Mentored on this to be part of that community and Both of those people are still active in communities that I'm a part of now So I think that this model of its singular tasks really works, and it's a very different model than the GNOME love model of Doing a lot of work to analyze a lot of bugs and list them and hope people find a page at all It's really publicity oriented first, and it's one-on-one mentorship, but also it's time-limited if You know there's no obligation For Maureen Duffy who was the main mentor for these to continue to mentor this new person past the first 20 days of that period It is however a lot of work still you do it for like right up all the skills You'll need to do it or if not people that have the skills linked to like resources on those But I think it's a really good example so On Wikipedia they created an effort called the tea house where they want to welcome new people Into Wikipedia by creating a social cafe-like space that might help support more new editors on the wiki And this is because in 2012 and for the some of the years before that the wiki media foundation was Wasn't kind of remains terrified of the number of editors to Wikipedia declining over time and Also, they're unhappy with the relatively low gender diversity of the wikipedia editor community Although if you talk to me after this, I think basically they're also really bad at statistics and do really low quality surveys I have a different talk about that, but But this effort the tea house addresses a real problem which is getting more editors to be more active and Their strategy was to hang a new editors on the wiki by sending them a personal message to their user account saying hey You're new here. Do you want to come to our social cafe-like space where people can friendly ask and answer questions and So they have this like message board on a wiki basically But they have a little bit of UI that makes it more friendly and they have a lot of contextual information that really tries to convince you this is gonna be a friendly place and That's really most of the project I think and yeah, so it's many to many it doesn't require this one-on-one mentor relationship like Google Summer of Code or the Fedora design bounties and On the front page to the tea house effort They show a sample question that has been answered so that people can get a sense that yeah questions do really get answered here And I kind of wonder if we just replace the front page of Debian mentors like the list archive page with one sample Question that got answered. Maybe more people would be less afraid of that mailing list Well, maybe they'd be wrong they should be afraid of it and so maybe we should actually fix it but But one of the things that they set up properly is that they had some goals and They set up their measurements before Organizing this outreach effort, so they wanted to measure how many people Participate in the tea house how many questions get answered and they find answer is just anybody replying to the message And how long that takes so what they found was that? People who use the tea house who are new editors compared to the people who don't use the tea house They edit ten times as many articles Across that's within Wikipedia and they make seven times more edits across all of the wiki media properties And this is the most exciting one. I think twice as much of their content is not reverted Which is quite an achievement is Jimmy I guess and They they have about 40 users per week asking and asking questions who are new users and Of the people who are on the tea house according to their surveys which have some bias problems But leaving that aside it seems that about three times as many more of them are women than in the control group So perhaps this suggests that the newest editors who are least like existing editors Benefit a lot from having this kind of conversational space which in a way makes plenty of sense The people who don't need this conversational space will be fine without it Having said that it's three times three times as many women compared to the baseline population it's still majority men participating in it's asking and answering questions on the tea house and One thing that they do that Debian doesn't really do is that they on the tea house There's a section where you are encouraged to write a little bit about yourself put your photo on a page and one of those users is Selected to be shown on the front page of the tea house plus one of the people who is answering questions, so They asked participants in the tea house Does it matter that we ask you to write about who you are what you want to get out of your experience at Wikipedia and The fact that you put a photo there and basically people say yes It's not only nice to write about what I want to get out of my experience at Wikipedia It's also really nice to see what other people want to get out of their experience at Wikipedia editing contributing so I've sort of aggregated a kind of concept inventory in a loose sense of ways to categorize and understand mentorship programs the first one is the question of who gets who is part of that mentorship program So we've been on love. It's a very open Almost dangerously open in the sense. You have no idea who's using it System other mentorship programs are more closed like Google Summer of Color where you have to be selected and the tea house is somewhere in the middle Where it's open to anyone but the people running it do send invitations and the people who receive invitations are more likely to actually participate by some huge factor One question for me about mentorship programs is about if they if When you participate in the mentorship program, do you end up with a new human connection to somebody? So in Genome Love if you go and click around on bugs you don't really end up with a new human connection but on the tea house somebody answers your question within an hour and You see their username and you click around and you may be while waiting click around the social profiles So you're like oh and by social profiles. I mean there's a wiki page with standard wiki ugly Image and like paragraph next to it with weird alignment. So we're not talking about like I framing Facebook or something here But even that does a great job of building human connections The tea house is interesting in that it is hopefully resilient to mentor mentee failure and You can see that in part because people sort of wander in and out of who answers questions people have different degrees of activity over time and That works out really well because they somehow set up a structure where people feel willing to answer a question or two and then wander off I think one of the big questions for me about mentorship projects is sort of why bother Which is to say can we identify the people or the groups of people who are benefiting from this mentorship program? so in the case of the tea house the goal is to make Wikipedia's editor community more vibrant and more gender diverse and so hopefully the readers the encyclopedia benefit the Other authors on the encyclopedia benefit the individual authors who are getting mentored benefit the people answering questions Hopefully benefit because they're having some fun answering questions With the genome love there's definitely some thought into whose life it's supposed to improve users of genome and other developers on the genome projects that we're inviting they're inviting people to But I think that basically with the tea house. They put in a lot more thought into thinking about which People are affected by the program and trying to make sure it was a good experience for them So by contrast with Google summer of code You know, I think is a boss later today. I was hearing some grumblings that maybe there is Okay, there's boss on the Google summer of code tomorrow and There's some grumblings in among many projects that participate in Google summer of code that the students get a lot out of it The mentors maybe get something out of it although they lose a lot of time and the project Maybe maybe maybe get something out of it and if you sort of show up If you sort of show up to a mentorship program without thinking clearly about what you want to get out of it And how you'll know if you're getting that out of it. You're unlikely to get as much out of it Which brings me to actually measuring the results you're getting out of it So I don't think that in Debian for GSOC we Measure we go and look and see which GSOC projects actually succeeded in which contributors stay around Maybe we just on an ad-hoc way Yeah If one of the goals is to create new contributors informally we do that If the one of the goals is to create more contributors, then it seems wise to ask the question, you know Is the children learning? Are the people actually stick around sticking around? and Interestingly the tea house is goal oriented It helps people answer questions about encyclopedia articles are trying to write some mentorship programs aren't really goal oriented, so I Mean I guess a kind of like The Debian mentorship mailing list is some combination of supposed to help you get review on your packages Just for you to like hang out and find out more about Debian It's also definitely not time-limited whereas Some of these programs are talked about are and there's this classification about Is it sort of one mentee to many mentors? Is it one mentor to one mentee? Is it I you know many to many the tea house is many to many Things like the Debian women mentoring program from three years ago And I guess that continues is sort of many to one where there's like four ish mentees per one mentor. Is that about right? Initially the mentoring program is one to one mentees and mentors, but I usually assign one to one. Okay. Yeah And there's one other question here, which I failed to write which is to what extent is that mentorship visible? Which just kind of relates back to the resilience to mentor mentee failure So on the tea house if somebody's question isn't being answered any other answerer can go and click and Answer whereas if you do private mentorship then other people in the community can't tell if people are succeeding at the mentorship goals and Sometimes that's okay, but it's just important to know to consider the publicness with regards to the resilience to the failure So I Have about 15 minutes left and I guess I want to cover a couple of other mentorship efforts But I'll try to do so briefly so we can have some conversation time at the end the first is easy hacks by LibreOffice and In a nutshell this is a combination of a keyword on the bug tracker like you know for what makes a Good easy task, but also about 16 other keywords for how hard the task is what kind of skills it requires And a collection of wiki pages on LibreOffice's website that tell you They'll let you browse these from the wiki rather than from the bug tracker So you don't have to learn bugzilla first you can read wiki text and we'll read a rendered wiki text and They found that it's super helpful to have a hand curated list of what these easy tasks are and to write a bit about How you would go solve them rather than just tag the bugs So I mentioned that At the open source comes the campus event that I ran three years ago, and that I've been running a bunch lately still We sort of ask new contributors to find a task in a project. They want to work on and then Mentor them during the day, but then afterward have no follow-up no really strong follow-up plan You sort of say you can email us if you want and nearly nobody does and I wish they would by contrast upstream University runs a very similar program of you know teaching skills and then getting people to decide what for software Project bug they want to solve but what they also do is say now that you've been here for these two days Every time you do eight hours of work personally on this toward this bug You should ping us and we'll schedule a one-hour IRC chat with you and your upstream University mentor and will go and read what you've done and Tell you how you think you can improve your contribution. So then they sort of serve as side input for patch review and helping you communicate better with the project Some of you may know the phrase. Well, anyway, never mind The idea though is that you will continue to be mentored until your contribution sticks to the project And that's been very successful for them although with with one or two exceptions, but basically Many many of the people who show up to those programs really want to put in the work It's just a matter of making sure that they have an expectation for the mentor that the mentor will be there for them and That then works out The favorite thing that I've talked to a handful of you about in person and set up score email to various Debian mailing lists about is the Ubuntu developer advisory team. So let me clarify that here and then talk about how I think I want to port that to Debian so Ubuntu has this semi-secret team called the developer advisory team on their wiki page They talk about their goals as greeting new contributors Encouraging people to apply for developer status in the project and Contacting people who have been lost who somehow uploaded a bunch of work of new packages got sponsored, but then they wandered off and I see this wiki page and I see those edited a year and a half ago almost and I say oh, okay This is like those blogs where people say oh man blogging is so much fun I'm gonna blog more and that's the most recent post and it's from like 2010 So that's that was my impression of the developer advisory team I had sort of written them off because everyone's always like oh, yeah, we need to mentor more and But it turns out that they are pretty active They just don't talk about it in public in public. They talk a little bit about this survey. They send new contributors I'll gloss over some of this it's in the slides. I guess I'll put them online They do send a survey to new contributors, but the really cool thing that they do is They secretly they track new Ubuntu contributors with the tool that they try not to tell anyone about because they're embarrassed that people are being tracked by them and Do that they use a table in the ultimate Debian database Ubuntu upload history and they just search for people whose uploads are Have been who do their first upload in the past three months and they show those people on a list And the idea of this list is if you are part of the developer advisory team Your mission is to go say hello to one of those people Send them a greeting email and be their welcoming point to the project and then You say that you did so you click a button then they get removed from that list And you have more people to go greet if you want to Or if not, then maybe you'll do so in two weeks more when you visit the page again. So I think that Yeah, I think that we should clone this we should query the upload history table not the Ubuntu upload history table and Reach out to Debian contributors who are new and not necessarily created this really tight mentor-mantee relationship Not necessarily do anything goal-oriented with this yet, but just welcome people And we can expand that beyond people who've gotten their packages sponsored by Either extracting more information or querying UDD and Lauren and I will maybe hack on that later today So This yeah, yeah, but this I think the looking at a produce story is a bit Looking too late in the process. Yeah, for many people. I agree with that Yeah, totally We get so the story with this is that I open hatch had a Google summer of code student because we're interested in taking the Ubuntu code making it generic having Me plus a Debian welcoming team all the way have to figure out what the name of it is do it for Debian And then make it useful for a variety of projects also So in addition to upload history being too late I like the idea of including bugs We should basically make sure that the source data is broadened scope to include non-packaging contributors for example, it might include people who have posted a mail or two or three on a developer focused mailing list or or translation commits or or Significant answering of questions. I'm not sure how this would be tracked in this without natural language processing in IRC or You know, we're showing up at that con and not having done anything before. Yeah, totally There's just a matter of writing the code to pull in identities from those sources. Yeah, I Did this it's on the video Yeah, I Just want to say there's might be quite a lot of overlap with Enrico's Dev contributes to stuff here So he's planning on tracking basically everything everyone does Yeah, I was chatting with him yesterday about that Did you yeah, one of the other things that well, we get complaints every now and then different projects is the Interface that people for example in Debian find a mailing list and stuff very intimidating Would it be a possibility to also offer some kind of Initial contact issue easier way. I don't know exactly what because I don't like forums, but is this being thought out? Well, if I understand correctly you're saying some Debian contributors find the mailing list interface overwhelming or intimidating They be a newcomer they didn't want to be contributors at least yeah, and I mean, I certainly felt that way It's why I like hung out on Debian various Debian mailing lists for years before trying to do anything useful for the project and I Mean I think part of that maybe it can be addressed by having a contact person who Introduces you to the project so you can then if this mentee can just email the person who greeted them and say so these mailing lists Should I really join them? Should I really talk on them and you'll say yes. Yes. Yes, and they'll finally get it But Fixing Does that enough to answer your question? I don't really remember my question was that That's a fact that many people find that intimidating because I've talked with new eyes and people who try to approach Debian And my my idea was is this being sort of taking into account. I mean, what's your suggestion regarding this apart from the Initial human contact like for example someone wants to get Because I mean many of the deviant contributors or the better present stuff came to Debian by knowing already some Yeah, but imagine that someone that's the case of some other people just want to try to do something They go to Debian page they get into the new the welcoming page the new mental space and stuff and some of those people are like They pull away because they did not comfortable with the interface That's one of the things that maybe you won't lose maybe doing better or not. I don't know I mean how What's your approach to that or what do you think about that? I mean, I guess I think a few things about that one is that it's a real problem And that the Wikipedia tea house in the if you read the report about their first six months they part of the feedback they got was One experienced Wikipedia contributor said I was really concerned and honestly unhappy that you guys want to change the interface to make it more friendly for newcomers and then when I but I didn't complain then and then I participated in the system and I was like, oh wow this interfaces makes me feel totally more welcome and it's much more inviting and it's still like an ugly media Wiki site, but there's a bunch more chrome around it and like you have to go through slightly fewer actions to our potty people So Is it really it's a real problem and it really ought to be fixed The other thing I want to say is I'm unlikely to be a person involved in fixing that in the next six to 12 months I hope that other people are But So I'll do this thing first and then I'll see but the other I mean A Problems with the Debian mailing lists can likely be fixed by writing a different archiving skin So and actually the Fedora project has been working on An archiver called Hyperkitty of like kitty mail no hyperkitty like hype like Piper mail, but not Piper Anyway, and it sort of puts people first and use the gravitar to show images of people's heads or whatever that you'd make their gravitar Yeah Yeah, it also allows you to reply in line Via a web interface, so it doesn't need you to use email which is maybe a hurdle to start contributing So maybe the right answer is who in this room is interested in spending two hours today? Trying to set up hyperkitty Okay, cool Often you guys after yeah I'm I am not really sure if it's really the interface only which is the problem I guess it's the environment and the contact with the people and For outsiders finding out what is the job they can do and but they can be involved with But there they can be successful and things like that This is also a good approach and maybe a step in that direction making the interfaces A bit shinier or things like that, but maybe not the core problem Yeah, well, I think it's they we should just fix all the problems at once. I can reply to that. I'm a Debian developer now Yeah I've been connected to the Debian project for a long time like I Don't know been using Debian for 10 years started contributing through Google summer of code in 2007 and I had a really hard time to like figure out what can I contribute with I'm a developer I'm a programmer, so I want to do develop and package or whatever and like oh, I'll take some orphan package That I don't use and don't have any usage For so why should I package that so I didn't because it doesn't make sense But it would be really nice and we talked about this on the welcome to debcon first session with Enrico like at this start and That's an issue for probably a lot of people So I don't have any solution, but it would be nice to like have a like a I don't know welcoming page That's not developers corner. That's more like easy Right. Yeah, and I think One of the things that seems clear to me about gonna love is that it takes the approach of Tagging and then forgetting And I don't like that as much as the Libre office easy hacks approach of if you're going to tag bugs with their easiness It's worth spending five times as much time also writing how to fix them Apparently I have one minute left. So everyone should ask a question at once I I agree with the last statement that If someone is not an insider kind of in the beyond it's really really hard to get involved It's it's I guess in my experience. It's very hard to get involved You look at the page you think you can Contribute there and you just realize who it's just much more complicated that I think think of So Andreas wants to say thing, but I want to quickly say two things first There's a debut mentors bot tomorrow at 3 30 p.m. I Secondly, I have a question for all of you who in the room is interested in Periodically, maybe sending emails to new contributors who we've detected are And now becoming to be active in the project Okay, who else in the room can take a picture if you all or write down your next Jimmy wait Everyone put your hands up again like that and then Jimmy and now let's say your names in order you Oh, yeah, but say them so he can write it down Yeah, again, I'll be Yeah, there are a theme who else was that a hand okay per If you're interested in Periodically sending emails to new contributors to greet them in Debian Raise your hand and Yeah, and and or put your name tag up. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Oh, yeah, there's video, right, okay? We'll just like press space on the recording. Okay, I I just have another comment how you could try to involve people we are doing in Debian Mates Prince and 2011 with not only Debian developer bus users and we have in my in my talk on Monday I have serious proof that this increased all Metrics we did of new developers So if you find some groups on team meeting just involve other people and why it's them and maybe I'll tell you more about in My talk this afternoon. Can I give you a high five? Okay, good enough for me, okay, okay one more Yeah, users are great user testing is something we don't do very much Which is to ask people to try to achieve tasks with Debian and then watch them fail and then fix the things that made them fail So we should do that more. Yeah I haven't been I've been since 2010 was the last time I was really Got a kid in between now and then so I've been busy with real life But the idea I had then is to have like one week or so IRC who had that like IRC mentorship with packaging or whatever and Has there been any such effort? I've missed that. Yeah periodically. Do you want to talk about that? I think time is up. So I mean you're all welcome to continue the discussion around its lunchtime now, right? Yeah, 15 minutes until lunch. So exactly. We have lots of time over lunch to talk. So please Thank you to Ashish for his presentation and everybody for the contribution. Yeah Okay. Yeah, now go back to talking No, yes, I just wanted to say that that we already tried that in different places in Debian and IRC tutorials are not enough. They don't they don't really serve us as tutorial They might be Complementing in regarding you can do feedback with particular questions Not as good questions that you would do in a mailing list, but it's not enough And so I think we should we should maybe rethink especially regarding new new generations Whether we should change our our tutorial ways Maybe even doing some some video casts or some something like that which is more I have some ideas to make IRC tutorial pop Yeah, which is basically to make sure that you the information about them gets out to people who really care about them So to make sure that they're part of the welcoming message If there's a little tutorial coming up and to capture contact information for people when they come to IRC tutorials So we can then follow up with them and to shepherd them into the project Yeah, this was sort of my idea since I do a lot of Well, everything is real life even internet but face-to-face meetings where I do packaging tutorials So this was like one way to do it on the internet, but video cast is Yeah, what I mean is that I've been doing for the last two years I've been receiving a student for last two years some of the course some of the course of Coursera and Some of these nice things that some universities are doing and they don't seem that hard to do in the technical way And maybe that could be a an easy way to get people at least to make people learn or to The entry point probably not I mean probably IRC is not the best way to teach I guess one question I have is how would we Reach how it once we've created the content. How will we find people and cause them to read the content or watch the content? It looks like per has an answer Okay, so I know a lot of people that I'm totally fine with reading text myself I love just digging into a really fat thick text document and I'm not scared about it But I was once but then there's people with dyslexia. They're really super talented people and if they get a video they're like They have the greatest time of their life. It's like, okay. I can't read a manual page, but Watching someone do what I want on a video cast is like Good, so I think I think videos is super So I have a question who wants to take Lucas's packaging tutorial PDF slides and make them into a video today Or if you don't make them into a video and make them to an ASCII screencast see people can watch the terminal stuff These are awesome, Kevin. I Guess there will be a presentation or a talk today or or maybe tomorrow tomorrow about this. Yeah Wait, what is that talk tomorrow? Oh? I don't know about tomorrow. I wasn't going to answer that In the packaging tutorial bar four or five different practical sessions and this would be really good targets for ASCII cast Yes, I don't know to do that myself Someone could Who wants to make an ASCII cast of those? It'll take you less than an hour and a half probably at least to try to start Come on. I need a hand Okay Okay, great. I'll happily help you. We'll talk at lunch But since I seem to be here I think ASCII dot IO is Web page where you can record ASCII screencasts and they have a free software tool that records your terminal session and then Let's it be played back in a browser not of the video, but as like text I'll show you What do you say it doesn't work? Yeah, okay. I was like what it worked great for me Other people ask questions while I figure out how the internet works Related to that, how do you see that package integrate with the existing packaging to your package? back Look, it's text and I got recorded by this like random script No, although I Don't remember if I mean as far as anyone can tell yes It's a totally random unauthenticated download script because that's the hip way to install software nowadays. Sorry Debian, but We should package it whatever but In fact in my crazy opinion once we get that written We should just have it lying around on the bottom of Debian.org when you scroll down. It just shows you how to make a package like this What's the difference between script which is that and script and script replay The difference between script replay and this is that it makes a web page just to repeat for the video Not that we're recording anymore or something. I don't know her are you convinced now you're going to save us all I was at this Debian for shy people Session also and the room was probably half this size but I raised the question about gender diversity then and From what I remember it wasn't really Welcome that question. So I'm so so I'm so happy to see you now and actually Like half your talk is about diversity and how to increase diversity I'm shocked and appalled of myself three years ago. I'll be go see the video until you mean Yeah, I my memory might be glorious Yeah, I can totally relate to that per se about Not knowing what to do and I was thinking about it at the Debian woman talk as well Maybe it might be helpful to have a list of wish list wish list items as in things you can work on But there is no pressure on doing so as in if you succeed and Do that idea that would be great to have but there's not Like if it's a bug and you try to fix then you break it even worse then that's and also the feathers Well, all that if I was all in one place so can easily search for them That sounds great. It should be a list of five bugs on a wiki page. Who will write that? Come on necessarily bugs or tasks. Yeah, I mean actually with with bugs themselves We've observed that we have the gift tag already, but It's usually easier for the maintainer to actually fix the bug if it's easy to fix than to to target It's it goes faster, and then you don't have to review any any patch or anything. So Yeah, it's just easier to fix it than to But that's totally not the point like purse says but that does mean therefore that when if when we're talking about these sorts of gift or Entry level tasks the person whose package it is or whose community it is really needs to Care about the onboarding part. I think what I would If we just ran a fedora design bounty clone once per two months where Somebody in some sub project said here's a task. We need you to do It's easy. I'll mentor you. I think that would go a long way to addressing this It would also be time-limited. So people wouldn't be worried about leaving their bugs as gift too long I have a comment as well in these lines I think it might be a bit heretic, but for me as well from personal experience It's kind of hard to go to a main team what public web archived mailing list and ask a question Without knowing whether I'm not gonna make a total ass of myself, right? So maybe it would be good to have some point of contact. That's actually a private mailing list Which you don't need to subscribe. You just send there there's a bunch of people who like to be welcoming and they answer you in private and Advise you where to write your question publicly and tell you that's not that bad and might even check your mail You sent there so you're not making a total ass of yourself Just to get that feeling out Person So I talked about calling something like the Debian welcoming team Is it okay if we call it the Debian member encouragement team or is that just weirdly bureaucratic? Okay, cool. We'll call it Debian welcoming. Maybe we'll make a mailing list like that. That's private for it. Also Actually, yeah, per had the mic then. Oh Sorry Maybe use contributor instead of member. Okay. Yeah. Oh Then like contributor encouragement team will come whatever we'll call Debian welcoming The the weird thing about calling it the welcoming team is that I if we finish if we fully clone the Ubuntu strategy Then we'll also have the welcoming team be getting in touch with people who like stopped Uploading for three months, which is kind of curious, but I don't really care. It's fine Yeah, the video team used to go eat lunch. Yeah, I thought the video was already over Okay, well feel free to end the video. That's what you're saying. Okay. Yeah, right now We can leave the mic open so for discussion. Yeah So just something about the idea of having tasks. Well easy task for new contributors. We discussed that already, but One idea could be to have a open I help package that Plugs into up to hook so that when you install a package you get a list of easy tax for the package you just installed and Well, if any or only our list if mention mention it if the package is all fun Then you could adopt it maybe and that's actually really easy to do probably So you're going to do it. You said right? No, that's not what I was going to say. Oh, okay I'm going to do it Probably when I have more time next year Okay But well, I can provide Directions for doing it. No using UDD as a data source to identify If you are interested just talk to me I have the same concerns that you had that's how how we how do we make that? I mean what you said is just rather true It takes me less time to just fix the boat than to to explain anything so so and I think it's that That's general for for all the the packages and all the teams in in Debian So, I mean, how do we get over that? How do we manage to to make people? Well describe the backs the easy backs instead of fixing them Well, we have some answers. So I guess I'll try to hear your answers before I try answering Can I get in the back first because he had his hand up? I think the answer should be just we don't because That's it. That's a problem. You can't avoid when you want to mentor I have never mentored something which will not have been easier for me to do myself I don't think that's I think mentoring only works if the mentor knows that