Re: Simple website

["Jon Stanley" <jonstanley gmail com>]

2008/4/28 Karsten 'quaid' Wade <kwade redhat com>:

>  Let me give an example.  Before the last FUDCon, Jon Stanley, who is
>  leading the revitalized Bug Triage team (with the help of @redhat.com
>  people, who we *are* a bit ubiquitous), said, "It's time we do this,
>  I'll come down there on Friday and we'll kick off a bug triage
>  SIG." (paraphrase)  I offered to pick him up at the airport, there was a
>  BarCamp session the next day, and away it went.  Ten kittens were born.

Hey from the lurker on f-websites-l :)

What Karsten said is 100% true - I'm not @redhat.com, there's nothing
that says you have to be in order to do great things in Fedora.  Sure,
it might help you in terms of the time crunch of competing demands of
$dayjob, but even that's not really true - the majority of Fedora
contributors @redhat.com don't do this as their day job.  As a
concrete example of that, I'll take the leader of the art team, Mairin
Duffy.  She's a UI designer for RHN Satellite - and the leader of the
art team on the side.

So do what I did, say "we have a problem and need to fix it NOW!", and
go forth and do it!  I'll pass along some (paraphrased) advice I got
from Greg DeKoenigsberg when I was starting:

Piece of advice #1: Do the work yourself for a few weeks to understand
what it entails.  Once you're satisfied, send a note to
fedora-announce list and say "I'm the new webmaster, unless someone
else tells me why they are the new webmaster."  Be the leader from day
one.  :)  (this is pretty much what I did)

Piece of advice #2 Have weekly meetings on IRC.   (NOTE:  I've pretty
much failed in this as of late :( ).

Piece of advice #3: Keep a TODO list on the wiki, and use that TODO
list to drive your weekly meetings.  And make sure that TODO list has
*names* and *dates*.  Hold people accountable, even if they're just
volunteers.  (reference http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Tasks
as a template)

One piece of advice that I'd add to this is to make sure that there is
a *clear* process to follow to get involved (much along the same lines
as this entire thread, really), and that you document that on the
wiki, and it's in an approachable format.  The BugZappers landing page
was put on a serious diet, and all of the content moved to various
subpages underneath it.

Good luck, and if you want to trade stories with someone who's
actually done this, I'll be at FUDCon Boston, look me up! :)