Welcome to Fedora!

Welcome to the Fedora community! We are the people that make the Fedora operating system (and all the other cool stuff around it)!

We have a process to welcome new community members to make them feel at home and quickly learn enough about the Fedora community to find areas they are interested in getting involved in. The idea is summarised in this Community Blog post.

Please contact us on any of our communication channels and we can help you get started.

Welcome to Fedora banner Feb2022

Workflow Summary

  • When a new person, say Jane, joins the Fedora community, she may or may not immediately know what she wants to do. If she doesn’t, the Join SIG aims to help to explore the community and find a part that suits her interests.

  • So, when Jane gets in touch with the Join SIG, we go through the following steps together. Jane does not need to know any of this. We, the community, will handle it all :)

  • We use Tags to mark the status of each ticket. Tags starting with S: track the status of the ticket from Jane’s perspective. Tags starting with C: track the status of the ticket from the community’s perspective. Tags starting with I: track Jane’s interests.

  • First of all, we ask her to create a Fedora contributor account. We then add Jane to the Fedora Join group on Pagure. This gives Jane permissions to interact with the Pagure projects that Fedora Join has.

  • Then, we open a new "Hello Fedora World" ticket for Jane on the Welcome-to-Fedora Pagure repository. The associated tag is: S: Hello Fedora World.

  • We also add Jane to the Fedora Join group on Pagure so that Jane and other newcomers all get notifications from their tickets. This will help them all beware of what everyone is doing, and they can all go through the process together.

  • We ask Jane to tell the community a little about herself so that people can get to know her. The associated tag is: C: Introduction requested.

  • When Jane has introduced herself, we mark the ticket with the S: Introduced myself tag.

  • Jane can comment on the ticket whenever she needs to ask questions, to give feedback, or just to chat. When Jane needs a response, she can use the C: Needs response tag to gain the community’s attention.

  • Jane then spends time exploring Fedora, speaking to people, learning how things work; all at her own pace. Jane is not expected to do any tasks at this time. The idea is for Jane to get comfortable with the Fedora community first and then dive into contributing by doing work.

  • From time to time, we check to see how Jane is doing. Each time we do so, we set a new tag:

    • At the first progress check, we will set the C: Progress check 1 tag.

    • If we do not hear from Jane in sometime, such as two weeks, we do a second progress check and set the C: Progress check 2 tag.

    • If we do not hear from Jane again, say for another two weeks, we do a third and final progress check. We set the C: Progress check 3 - Final tag.

      • If we don’t get a response in the next 7 days, We would tell her that we’ve not seen activity and we’ll have no choice to close the ticket.

      • Closing the ticket is only a formal and operational task, then if Jane likes, they can get in touch with us again using the various communication channels.

    • If we do not hear from Jane here also (so, in total for about 6 weeks), we assume that Jane is inactive and close the ticket with the S: User unresponsive tag.

  • Some infrastructure in Fedora requires Jane to be part of a team or group on the Fedora Account System. We will give her temporary membership to the fedora-join FAS group if required. This can be requested by setting the C: Temporary membership needed tag to the ticket. After discussing the situation, if temporary membership to the FAS group is given, we will mark the ticket with the C: Temporary membership approved tag.

  • As Jane learns about the community, she will hopefully find tasks and teams that interest her. When she has joined a team, she has become a contributing Fedora community member! We mark the ticket as S: I am Fedora to celebrate this.

  • We collect feedback from new community members. For this, we use the S: Feedback tag.

  • Finally, when Jane feels that she no longer needs our help, we can close the ticket.

  • If, due to certain circumstances, Jane decides to move on from contributing to the Fedora community, we will close the ticket with the S: User closed tag.

How the team manages this workflow

The team has a few Scripts to accomplish this task and verify user’s activity: