fedora users contribution

[Andrew Farris]

Christoph Höger wrote:
> these are problems you are probably always going to have, because the
> wast majority of people is just not interested in "how things work".
> This is not wrong from a user friendly point of view but leads to the
> fact that most users are even unable to ask the right questions or
> unwilling to read some guidelines.
> So if you open up a BB or something for newbies, you will probably get
> 99.9% of questions which are correctly answered by RTFM or are even not
> understandable.
> Best way to help those users in particular problems is IMO a direct
> personal approach with really friendly (and patient) supporters.
> So I think the best solution would be to encourage those supporters
> everywhere to translate the problems into geekish and send them to the
> right points. Although some polls or stuff could help too.

The other method that works VERY well for getting feedback with users new to 
linux is the basic 'HOWTO' wiki or forum that has comments...  Thats an area 
that fedora is lacking compared to many other distros.  There is an ever 
increasing community at fedoraforum.org, which is good, but good howto docs 
(with ability for users to comment/ask questions) is behind.  These docs don't 
have to be exhaustive, just accurate and specific about doing one thing with 
specific hardware/software.

The people helping out with posting on fedoraforum do need to keep in mind 
though, anything that really should be brought to devs attention (bz, mailing 
lists, etc) needs to be done by the person with the answers on the forum, not 
the guy with the questions.

Getting new users into irc is one of the first and best steps as well...

Most people that are new wouldn't know what to do with bug reports, followups, 
closing when they are finished, so thats not really a good format for that kind 
of info dissemination.

-- 
Andrew Farris <lordmorgul at gmail.com> <ajfarris at gmail.com>
  gpg 0xC99B1DF3 fingerprint CDEC 6FAD BA27 40DF 707E A2E0 F0F6 E622 C99B 1DF3
No one now has, and no one will ever again get, the big picture. - Daniel Geer
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