On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 11:03:31PM -0700, brynn wrote:
I think that's a brilliant idea. You're right that we have written bits
along these lines in the past, which could be extracted, dusted off, and polished to be more digestible to a more modern audience.
You're right that there's probably a few different "types" of people so maybe a few different pages to message in different ways would make sense. I.e. one that talks to people who could get into coding work might focus on explaining branches and patch contributions, whereas another page might come from the angle of someone who isn't AT ALL interested in coding and instead just address good non-coding ways to contribute. Another one geared for translators, another maybe for evangelists, yet another specifically focused on usability testing. Or something like that.
Would you like to take a shot at extracting the existing text and roughing it into a more useful shape? I think I could contribute verbage to the pages, or link in someone to help.
Bryce __________________________________________________
Yeah sure, as long as we're waiting for OSUOSL, I have time to spare. I'll have to look in the FAQ to see what's left still there. Because now that I think of it, a lot of it has been brought to the Contribute page already, and some on the Promote page.
https://inkscape.org/en/contribute/ https://inkscape.org/en/contribute/promote/
Ah, guess it's been a while since I've browsed the website. It looks like most of what I am thinking we should have, we already have! So there's a lot of good work already done, but of course always room to improve. A few notes below...
Should we split those sections up, and add more to them? I think what might be missing, to address this concern, is language that perhaps is more inviting (and maybe more warm and fuzzy?) as opposed to strictly informational.
The sections look good. Would it make sense to reverse the order? I.e. I imagine more of this page's visitors will have skills relevant to items towards the bottom of the list, so move those up top? And people looking to code for Inkscape likely will be drawn to the Develop top level menu already, so the link to it from the Contribute page doesn't need to be prominent.
I'm in favor of keeping wording friendly, but actually the page looks ok to me as it is -- admittedly I'm probably not the best to judge. There's benefit to keeping Contribute concise, but perhaps friendlier language could be placed on the sub-pages. (E.g. the opening sentence of Contribute and Promote ought to be more engaging.)
I really like the Community To-Do List page (contribute/to-do-list) and imagine potential contributors may be drawn here looking for specific needs. Expanding this list and keeping it to well-defined items, and seeded with good entry-level work that doesn't require a lot of Inkscape-specific know-how could be very beneficial.
Next I'd put the Non-Coding section, and again I'd reverse the order: Promote first, then Translations, Bugs, and Testing. (I would also omit the 'Non-Coding' section title, so we're not giving the impression that the work is less important than coding or something.) There should also be a section on 'Helping Other Inkscape Users'.
The Promote section should have a better description written for it, to make it more engaging. The Promote subpage needs some work - I'd focus this to just the last part of the page, the stuff under "Spread the Word!" Everything else on that page should be moved or maybe just dropped; some of it might fit under "Show Off your Inkscape Artwork".
The Helping Other Inkscape Users should be moved from the Promote page to its own page. There is a lot of opportunities for contributing to the Inkscape project in the form of technical support and user assistance, participating on Inkscape Forum, etc. and we should properly highlight that area of work.
The Translations section looks fine. The Translation subpage looks very good too. It's got a friendly and welcoming opening paragraph, is very specific with initial tasks for onboarding, and then has a list of very specific tasks and guidelines making it a solid reference. This subpage is a good one to model for all the other subpages.
The Bugs section I think could be made more specific to just Review and Verify Existing Bug Reports. That's what we really need help with, and in terms of helping the project reporting bugs is really more of a subset of the Testing task.
For Testing, I like that we have guidelines, and it's good that this section links to them. The contribute/testing page is marked out of date though. "Testing" can mean a spectrum of different activities, so perhaps there's some opportunities here to give some more specific actions. This is a key area we need help, and is also a perfect place for new technical folk to get their feet wet, so improvements to this page could have big long term benefits to the project.
The Working with Code section kind of duplicates what is on the Develop page, and I think could be reduced to just "Inkscape Core Development" (with the link to the Develop page), and "Website Development" (with a link to a landing page with a friendly introduction to the website development). The subsection on Packaging Inkscape could be moved to the end of the Develop page.
I know we had a report recently, where someone thought the info about helping with the website should be on the Contribute page, rather than Promote. I originally put it on Promote, because I was thinking that's what the website does, is promote Inkscape.
Sure that seems logical, although I think I agree the Promote page should be geared more for evangelizing activities, whereas in practice website work tends to be more about wordsmithing and page design (with some HTML/Django technicalities tossed in for fun).
Ok, the only thing left in the FAQ is this:
https://inkscape.org/en/learn/faq/#how-communicate-effectively-throughout-in...
which I deliberately left there, thinking it should probably be deleted, but not wanting to make that decision alone. I think we can definitely use that first paragraph. And maybe some other parts too? Since we have the CoC, we can probably lose the flamewar part.
Right, much of that is pretty dated. Maybe something of use can still be made of some of it but I don't think it needs to live in the FAQ. If you need a place to move it, you could stick it on http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/OtherGoals. I've already got a todo to cleanup that page some day.
Hhmm....I'm thinking of an introduction to the Contribute page, which contains most of that info. Section title "So, You Want to Contribute to Inkscape? Here's how to get started" More warm and fuzzy, but maybe too corny?
C R, jump in with comments too :-)
Thanks! Sorry for the lengthy reply.
All best, brynn PS - another thought - Maybe the CoC could have some language for bringing new people in without saying "patches welcome"?
Nah, I'd guess by the time a reader got to the CoC they would have already seen enough of Inkscape to already feel appropriately welcome. :-)
Bryce
-----Original Message----- From: Bryce Harrington Sent: Sunday, January 22, 2017 7:51 PM To: brynn Cc: C R ; inkscape-devel Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] User Involvement Was: Post-Mortum: Line heightbug
On Sun, Jan 22, 2017 at 08:50:49AM -0700, brynn wrote:
"Patches welcome" has become a flippant and dismissive way to say, "well, fix it yourself".
Most of my experience helping Inkscape users is in forums (approx 8 years), as opposed to the mailing list (approx 2 or 3 years). I've never seen this suggested in a flippant or dismissive way.
I could see a webpage....or a section of a webpage, which has kind of a pitch or invitation. Without looking, I don't remember specifics, but I think parts of the faq (user faq on the website) already do this. So it could be made into a page or section of a page. Since people have all different kind of issues, we couldn't provide the support info. But it could include generalized support info, along with everything else I mentioned above. And then when we find ourselves thinking "patches welcome", we could link to it, rather than type it all out, every time.
Or would that be too impersonal? If the Inkscape project is known for being a friendly community (as someone said earlier) it could be written in sort of a warm, fuzzy way.....if that would help? Just a thought :-)
I think that's a brilliant idea. You're right that we have written bits along these lines in the past, which could be extracted, dusted off, and polished to be more digestible to a more modern audience.
You're right that there's probably a few different "types" of people so maybe a few different pages to message in different ways would make sense. I.e. one that talks to people who could get into coding work might focus on explaining branches and patch contributions, whereas another page might come from the angle of someone who isn't AT ALL interested in coding and instead just address good non-coding ways to contribute. Another one geared for translators, another maybe for evangelists, yet another specifically focused on usability testing. Or something like that.
Would you like to take a shot at extracting the existing text and roughing it into a more useful shape? I think I could contribute verbage to the pages, or link in someone to help.
Bryce