[kde-community] Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is.....

[Arjun Ak]

>- Allowing email as the only way of communication
The kernel community uses email as the primary form of communication.
Patches can only be submitted via emails. They also have a very strict
format for sending patches
(https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/SubmittingPatches).


>- Telling people that HTML mails will be rejected
>From http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html#taboo:
>The Majordomo is configured with a set of filter rules which when triggered will send the email to "/dev/null".
>    Usage of HTML in email -- even as an alternate format -- is considered to be signature characteristics of SPAM.
>Ignore this at your own peril!

Eudyptula put the above restrictions because the community has them in
the first place. The aim of the challenge is not just to teach them to
write kernel modules but also to contribute back to the community and
get a patch accepted into the mainline kernel.


>- Explicitly prohibiting people to ask questions
I think they meant questions like "How to complete Task3. I did not
even bother to google" and not ones like "Is foo1 safer than foo2 when
doing bar for task3".






On Sat, Sep 13, 2014 at 7:26 PM, Thomas Pfeiffer <colomar at autistici.org> wrote:
> On Thursday 11 September 2014 15:56:01 Arjun Ak wrote:
>> How about having something similar to the eudyptula challenge
>> (http://eudyptula-challenge.org/) ?
>
> Please don't take this personally, Arjun, but the challenge you linked to
> serves as the ideal example of how we should _not_ do this ;)
>
> Its underlying assumption seems to be "if we raise the barrier of entry as
> high as possible, we only get the really good people", so they did what they
> could to frighten people off by
> - Allowing email as the only way of communication
> - Telling people that HTML mails will be rejected
> - Explicitly prohibiting people to ask questions
> - Using quite harsh words to describe those limitations
>
> This is the antithesis of welcoming inexperienced, insecure people who would
> like to give back to the community that produced software they love, but don't
> know how.
>
> If there is one thing which the VDG taught us, it's that we should do the
> exact opposite of what the Eudyptula Challenge does: We should lower the
> barrier as far as possible, we should offer people help and advice wherever we
> can, we should ease their minds and help them to overcome their insecurities.
> Many new contributors in the VDG forum introduce themselves with "I'm not a
> designer, but...", and then they often present brilliant ideas, which are
> sometimes just be scribbled on a piece of paper due to lack of knowledge of
> using graphics software, but can easily be taken up and refined by the
> community to the point where they are clear enough to be implemented.
>
> And people in the forum learn along the way, from each other. They learn how
> to use graphics applications, and some even take a stab at QML in order to
> help their ideas become a reality.
>
> The VDG showed us is that attracting people willing to help us out and
> motivating them to stick around and grow as they go along is more important
> than "securing top talent" by raising the barrier. So yes, we need to put
> quite some effort into this, but I'm sure it will pay out in the end.
>
> Cheers,
> Thomas
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