We had a constructive meeting today and I feel like we're making slow and steady progress. The links are here:

• Minutes: https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-3/2016-10-10/fedora-join_october_10_2016.2016-10-10-15.00.html
• Minutes (text): https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-3/2016-10-10/fedora-join_october_10_2016.2016-10-10-15.00.txt
• Log: https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-3/2016-10-10/fedora-join_october_10_2016.2016-10-10-15.00.log.html

The main item on today's agenda was to follow up from our discussion in the last meeting to clarify the function of the SIG itself. As a short reminder, there was some unease about the possibility that Fedora Join may over lap with other SIGs, especially CommOps (which is currently engaged in going over the on boarding processes of different SIGs to see if they can be improved/streamlined).

I took the opportunity to summarise what I'd proposed in my e-mail to the list. Our specific aim is given here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Join_SIG#Aim. In a sentence, it is: "The Fedora Join SIG aims to set up and maintain channels that let prospective contributors engage with the community." So, we want to be a region of the Fedora community where prospective contributors and community members can hang out together and benefit from each other.

How do the two parties benefit? Well, it is quite clear that newbies benefit immensely from interacting with community members. It is how they learn the general workflow of the project and it is how they learn the ropes of how to go about navigating tasks and issues. Contributors, on the other hand, obviously benefit by finding new blood to help out in their different teams. Now, it may appear that this interaction already occurs when novices join different SIGs. Sure it does, but the order of things is a bit different. Currently, the order is:

1. someone turns up
2. after some surfing picks a team to join up
3. introduces themselves to the team members, gets to know them
4. makes friends, maybe finds a mentor in the team
5. works on a task (ticket/issue), attends meetings
6. maybe begins to help another team later and then makes friends there
7. repeat
8. gets to know how the community works in general
9. gets an idea of how different teams function and work together.

What we're looking at is something more like this:

1. someone turns up
2. finds us cool contributors from all over the community, gets to know us,
3. makes friends, finds a mentor (community mentor as opposed to team specific mentor)
4. gets to know how the community works in general
5. gets an idea of how the different teams function and work together
6. picks tasks in one or more teams to work in (higher chance of being interested in multiple teams that carry out related tasks)

While the changes may seem subtle, they bring certain advantages:

• new contributors are not limited to team specific relationships
• they are not limited to team specific tasks, and contributors being part of different teams enables better integration between teams
• they have a better understanding of the bigger picture - the complete machinery of the project
• folks that join together can work together and help each other out especially given that there's a lot in common between the workflows that different teams follow - scaling the learning curve together takes considerably less effort than doing it alone

Anyway, I'm still looking to collect more feedback on this from the community. Hopefully by next week, we'll iron out any remaining kinks and begin on a list of tasks/activities/ideas related to making the Join SIG better known to both the community and newbies. These can be on the agenda for our next meeting in a fortnight.

In the meantime, we'd love to hear what you think. Please join our mailing list and hang out in the IRC channel (#fedora-join on Freenode), and of course, give us feedback however you find it convenient. We even have an FAS group you can join, although, this doesn't serve much purpose at the moment.

Have a good week ahead!