Neomantra.org

Last week I did a review of the pathways towards involvement with KDE that are posted on the web and some of the problems I ran into.  In the process of writing that review I stumbled across the listserv home and so I picked the one that seemed most appropriate for addressing my concerns, “KDE-Promo“, and signed up.  Then I fired them a quick email pointing them to my post and also explaining how I’d like to get involved.  You can check the archives to see the details but I’m happy to report the results have been very good thus far.  I got several responses and some good advice about ways to get started.  For those who didn’t read through the archived thread, my current activities are:

1. Scan all the lists that have been setup for KDE and find the outdated/unused/dead ones so we can get rid of them
2. Review and document the public facing KDE web sites that look to be out of date (excluding historical/archived news type of things) so we can update or remove them

While both of these things seem pretty simple and mundane (and yes, reviewing things like this in detail is indeed mundane), I think they’re both critically important.  If the goal is to bring in new contributors and build the community it’s imperative we make it easy on folks to find their way to the door and that when they knock, someone is there to welcome them in.

The mailing list cleanup seemed like the simpler of the two tasks so that’s where I started.  Though now that I’ve started digging in I’ve found that it’s taking more time than I anticipated.  I spent a good chunk of time already making a spreadsheet to categorize “active” versus “inactive” and recording the last active thread date for each list.  I’ve reviewed 70 lists to this point and of the lists I’ve reviewed 24 of them look inactive or were never even used from what I can tell.  It’s unfortunate that so many existing lists aren’t being used, but at least it makes me glad I’m taking the time to check on this stuff.  Just 122 more to go now Once I’m done I will provide the full spreadsheet back to the KDE-Promo list for people there to review and take action on (if they agree with my findings).  It’s been a little difficult determining exactly what “inactive” should be in some cases, but for the most part lists are either really active with tons of posts every month or they haven’t been touched in over a year so there are not a whole lot of gray areas so far.

Once that’s all done I’ll move on to the web site review.  One thing that’s become more clear to me as I’ve gotten some feedback from others is that keeping all the web pages up to date is generally a thankless job and is more work than casual contributors can deal with.  With that in mind I think my goal as I perform the web site review will be to simply eliminate as many of them as possible much like I’m doing with the mailing lists rather than trying to build a list of ones we should update.  The more clutter that is out there the harder it is to find things…especially when they’re not being kept up to date.  If we can slim down the number of sites we’re trying to maintain that should improve the chances that everything is kept current as well.  It was also mentioned on the list that there is some movement towards trying to get more wiki pages going rather than static HTML content so they can be more easily modified collectively by the community.  I think this will help a lot as well.

One final thing I’d like to do in this area is to make sure there are places on the sites that point people to the corresponding listservs and IRC channels for whatever the topic of that page is.  Getting involved seems like a really daunting task until you find an active list where there are people around to help show you the ropes and give you a friendly nudge in the right direction.  If we can get people to the proper list or IRC channel before they get frustrated digging through old web content I think we’ll be more successful in roping in potential contributors.  In addition they’ll meet people and begin to get to know the community which is what KDE is really all about!