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R1/Alpha : Welcoming the Newcomers
Context
Imagine the release just got out the door; what needs to be ready at this point to get everything running smoothly ?...
Newcomers
We need some structure to welcome newcomers (developers and others) effectively. I think many -- everything is relative -- people with various skills will come and may ask things like :
- Where can I help ?
- I want to port [insert favorite software from linux] !!!!
- Many others...
We should make sure that we can "steer" them to the correct teams (according to their tastes).
My understanding is that the team concept is quite loose at the moment. It fits well with a relatively small core of developers, since it doesn't add unnecessary "ceremony". But I think as the community will grow, it might be useful to have some light structure. There would be no bosses for say, but welcomers, mentors. They would be a small set of people that knows the inners of the topics relative to the team tasks and can help the beginners to get started, invite them to suscribe to the MLs, etc..
We should stress out the fact that at that point, we need more than coders.. We will need people in those teams too :
- User guides, documentation,...
- Artwork
- Quality Assurance
- Public Relations
- ...
Some other peoples will without any doubts try Haiku out of curiosity, and know almost nothing from it before hand, and we might need to be able to answer their questions. A good first approach possibly means that they will share their experience with friends, and you see the cascade coming right? Depending the volume of those requests, it can be quite time consuming to answer verbosely to everyone.. So we should make sure the user guide is so good that we will gladly point them to it! :) But it might be nice to have some PR representants to help answer the questions.. ;-)
Again, comments welcome, it's definitely not complete nor definitive.. Just some food for thoughts :)
- stpere's blog
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Comments
where non-coders could register to offer help?
where non-coders could register to offer help?
this place should include:
- experience with HAIKU/BeOS
- expertise/know-how to offer
- availability in terms of time
Re: R1/Alpha : Welcoming the Newcomers
This is great news. I've been following this project for a long time and dying to have a liveCD to try out. The VM's don't really give you a good sense of the speed and feel of the OS. When it's ready I will be able to point allot of my Linux friends to a great un*x backed desktop that's not made by Apple and not one of the billions of Linux distros. I already had one friend recently ask me if there were any updates. I'm a graphic artists and can help out just unsure of where to start, anything to get this project moving forward!
Re: R1/Alpha : Welcoming the Newcomers
Thanks, Philippe, for trying to get things moving. I know it feels sluggish at times, but I guess that's because the problems aren't yet upon us...
It all depends on how big the newcomer-flood will turn out to be. I wouldn't expect _too_ much of an influx. (Hope that I'm wrong. :) )
From my non-dev perspective the developer mailing list could easily stand a little more traffic. Nonetheless, re-organizing all the different guides and howtos and the FAQ would really help. On the web-mailing list recently was a discussion on more of a wiki approach. We'll see if anything comes out of that.
I could imagine that the number of endusers won't increase that much with an alpha. Beta and later R1 will (hopefully) be another story. Since many people will probably come through this website, the forums will be their first stop. Judging from the "Name a browser" thread, it seems that there are quite a few people monitoring the forums. We'll see how we all can deal with incoming enduser questions.
The user guide should be online, but the site started by Jorge and me is currently frozen. The proposed drupal approach is deemed too maintenance intensive by Jorge. If nothing else comes up, the static HTML version from SVN should be at least available when the alpha is out.
Another important topic is the creation and maintaining of a hardware compatibility list. Maybe the haikuware's database can be a start, though I'd prefer one long text list (maybe with filtering possibilities) instead of splitting things into categories with graphics and things.
@Mike: I dunno what graphics are needed at this time. If you're good with icons, start up your Icon-O-Matic and get cracking. :) There are a few Haiku apps and many 3rd-Party apps that still need a vector icon. Just contact the maintainer first to see if the app is still alive and if she's interested...
Cool Alpha t-shirt, flyer, poster etc. designs would also be great.
Or post some nice backgrounds in a forum post. Even if those don't necessarily make it into Haiku by default, it's a way to inspire people and can get things going.
Oh, and Haiku isn't un*x based. :)
Re: R1/Alpha : Welcoming the Newcomers
Hey,
I am a potential new user. Basically I am following haiku because I was told that Avid NLE was used on BeOS and I like the idea of a super fast multi-threading system. I know this will take another few years in Haiku. My tech knowledge is very low. I have dual booted with Ubuntu and have started learning some command line stuff, but I'm a slow learner.
I plan to check out the Live CD. However because of my inexperience I am not always sure if what I am reporting is a bug or just something I failed to understand properly.
The best thing would to give me some objectives. Like what happens when you do this, what happens when you do that. Or some tests about how the OS works with my hardware. How easy was it for you to do X.
In short some objectives will go much further then being told to try it out and report back.
Re: R1/Alpha : Welcoming the Newcomers
Hi Tadeusz.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean with "objectives". I suggest you try out the vmware images in VMWare Player or VirtualBox and have a look at the user guide.
If you have any end-user questions, don't hesitate to post in the forum. Others may find your threads there in the future and learn from it. So your questions (and their hopefully helpful answers) actually help not only yourself. :)
Re: R1/Alpha : Welcoming the Newcomers
What I meant by objectives is this. Instead of me randomly trying to use haiku and doing random noob things. If a developer gave me some things to try. See if you understand how this works. What happens when you do that. I.E give me things to test so you get more direct feedback.
I'll have to learn how to use VMware first. As I said I'm a slow learner so in 2/3 weeks I should have figured out how to set it up and install hauiku. I typically have to try things a few times before I figure it out.
Re: R1/Alpha : Welcoming the Newcomers
I don't think you'll get a detailed description what exactly to try. Writing it all down would take the dev roughly the time it would take to do it himself. :)
I think, simply actively using and observing every detail of an app/component will expose many of the major flaws. If you subscribe to the commit mailing list, you can follow where work is being done and sometimes concentrate your efforts on these new/changed things. With sometimes almost 100 commit messages, this may be overwhelming, however. Just skim over them quickly to see if there's anything for you in it... :)
You could also look through old tickets in Trac and try to reproduce the reported bugs. There are always tickets that were solved with some commit and nobody remembered there even was a ticket for that. Also, you may discover more details about the bug that can help fix it.
If you report a bug yourself make sure to use the search function to avoid duplicates. There's also a document to help with submitting helpful bugreports.
I used VMWare before, but switched to VirtulBox. It feels much faster.
It's quite easy to set up, see Michael's blog about it. Just make sure to use the official Sun version, not the Open Source version. Also, you don't have to convert a raw image, just use a regular vmware image.
Hey, why don't you open a new thread in the forum if you have any questions. I think we hijacked Philippe's thread long enough now. :)